Bread & Puppet presents The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus, a brand new show in the tradition of the iconic Bread & Puppet circuses that began at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont in 1970. As usual, the show will draw on traditional circus tropes and familiar Bread and Puppet iconography to draw attention to the urgent issues of the day. Stilt dancers, paper maché beasts of all sizes and a riotous brass band will make a raucous, colorful spectacle of protest and celebration.

This year The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus will be performed in our outdoor amphitheater each Saturday and Sunday.

The Saturday circus will be followed by a performance of Gaza Gray Lady Cantata. Each Saturday, July 13th – August 31st at 3pm.
The Sunday circus will be followed by our traditional, large-scale outdoor pageant, a giant spectacle in the surrounding landscape. Each Sunday, July 14th through August 25th at 3pm.

*Please come early to allow time for parking and to enjoy side shows, beginning at 2pm.
All shows at The Bread & Puppet Theater, 753 Heights Rd. Glover, VT
Tickets for all summer shows are $10 each. Each ticket is for all performances on a given day. We ask that you purchase tickets ahead of time. However, it’s central to our philosophy that our performances are as accessible as possible and no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Admission by cash donation for kids 6 and under. You can purchase tickets on our website at: https://breadandpuppet.org/book-tickets-for-upcoming-shows
Cheap Art: On all performance days Bread and Puppet’s Cheap Art – books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread and Puppet Press – will be for sale in the Bread & Puppet Museum Store and in the Circus Field.
A bit more about our shows: Bread & Puppet’s founder and director, Peter Schumann, describes The Beginning After The End of Humanity Circus: “After the appropriate death dances for the burial of the empire-of-horror and it’s horrified humanity and after the screaming-trees-choir teaches earthlings how to scream against the daily atrocities, the new underneath-all-of-this humanity emerges from under the rubble, whose voices must make the new language that the new humanity needs.”

In the late 60’s through the mid 1970’s, Peter Schumann created a series of shows in response to the Vietnam war called “The Gray Lady Cantatas”. The shows featured the iconic gray lady puppets moving through vignettes both dreamlike and brutal. This new version, Gaza Gray Lady Cantata, was created and co-directed this spring by father-daughter team Peter and Maria Schumann. It uses texts from Palestinians living through the war in Gaza, and, like the older versions of the show, is a meditation on grief, war, and resistance.
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Background Information about Bread and Puppet:

Bread & Puppet Theater is an internationally celebrated company that champions a visually rich, street-theater style of performance art filled with music, dance and slapstick. Its shows are political and spectacular, with huge puppets made of paper maché and cardboard. Founded in 1963 by Peter and Elka Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side, the theater has been based in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont since the early 1970s.