So this is what I have been putting off so long - the point at which I fill in the gaps and attempt to make sense of this past summer. The truth is that I feel almost guilty about the summer I have had, so rich and full of beauty, discovery and journeys as it has been. In any case the summer began with my five week internship with the Bread and Puppet theatre in Glover, Vermont, USA.
I, along with approximately 30 other interns aged between 19-60ish and coming from various parts of the States, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Germany, England, Greece and New Zealand spent five weeks on the 'farm', the base for Peter Schumann's theatre company which has been there for several decades, helping to put together sketches for the weekly outdoor circus performance, rehearsing dance sequences for a weekly indoor show and constructing/fixing huge puppets for street parades. And within those categories came endless lists of additional roles: singing in the Georgian choir, playing instruments in the circus band, costume-making, mask-making, stilt-walking... I thought I'd like to sum up the experience by reducing it to the basic elements which made it, for me, such a powerful experience.
Bread and Alioli
How could I not start with Bread? Since the very beginning, Peter Schumann has been making his own wholemeal sourdough bread (with a starter from Scandanavia, apparently) to accompany all performances and turn them into a ritual of sharing, celebration and sustenance. Drizzled over this bread, straight out of his huge cob bread oven which is fired up several times a week, is an adapted Bread and Puppet version of alioli, dozens of pummelled and smashed garlic cloves beaten with oil and chopped parsley, and made on the farm regularly with a pestle and mortar on the scale of a biker's helmet and a cricket bat. Bread and alioli wove together the performances on the farm and also the community life of the company and interns, as we piled our plates high with the stuff every mealtime. Never before have I felt healthier or more brimming with energy than on that farm, and though I'm sure we must have all stunk to high heaven of garlic not one of us got ill throughout the entire internship, and the zest and vigour of the people around me was seemingly relentless.
The sound of music
Music, like bread, unified the different aspects of Bread and Puppet's shows, circuses and parades, just as it unified day to day living for the company. We lived on music, we devoured it hungrily every day and there were slots for it in our agenda just as there are for mealtimes.
The wonderful Bread and Puppet band, despite the transient nature of its seasonal members, gelled together shows and parades, providing a constant soundtrack and snappy, raucous interludes to sketches...it was the tin for the watercolour pencils, the egg box for the eggs...I could offer more metaphors but I won't.
Similarly, choral harmonies seeped into everything. Traditional Georgian songs, Shapenote, gospel...sometimes the only way to complement the visual effect of a huge, stately puppet moving slowly across the arena was with the haunting, melancholy notes of a Georgian melody, its language strange and indecipherable, like the visual language of those vacant-eyed puppets. The Georgian songs which we immersed ourselves in during those five weeks crept into me and still won't let me go.
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it..." Goethe
...Above all, this is the message that my five weeks with Bread and Puppet gave me. Before I arrived on the farm, I prided myself on my dreams but felt too terrified to even begin to thrust them into the world and make them a reality - terrified, I expect, of failure, after spending a lifetime building my dreams so high. But under the care of Peter Schumann I came to understand that there is no point in dreams which are unrealised, which remain brooding and fermenting in the brain. They must be thrown out into physical form quickly, with the briskness of a nurse ripping off a plaster. Of course this requires the dreaded reality check, the confrontation of all those fears that actually, our dreams won't live up to our high expectations. But the Bread and Puppet philosophy doesn't concern itself with 'greatness' or 'quality' or 'success' - what matters is simply that you Do It, and you do it in the quickest way possible, because life is too short and there are too many ideas to play around with. Don't think, just do it, find materials and do it - don't spend too much time on it, just give it some kind of form and then it can take on its own life. For a semi-obsessive anxious perfectionist like myself, this philosophy was life-saving, and life-changing.
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