Bread & Puppet presents the Vermont premier of "Declaration of Light" at Camp Meade in Middlesex on Saturday, May 22! A celebration of the return of the light, presented at the height of spring.
A Cheap Art Sale will begin at 3 pm and the Declaration of Light will commence at 4:30.
Tickets will be $25 for adults, kids 11-16 $10 and kids 10 and under FREE.
The Green will be open free of charge to the public until noon and for ticket holders only from 1pm till after the show (also open to the public after the show).
The Glover-based theater troupe’s show is a culmination of and transformation of a series of short shows presented during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2020 while Bread & Puppet company members were making final preparations for a nationwide spring tour that the pandemic would soon force them to cancel, Bread & Puppet director, Peter Schumann, was working on a new series of paintings driven by imagery of human hands and texts exploring the concepts of light and darkness.
Schumann painted these new pictures with discount latex house paints on discarded hotel bedsheets donated by a friend.
After Bread & Puppet's spring national tour was cancelled, and as prohibitions on theater performances remained in effect in Vermont, the company turned its attention to creating short shows based on Schumann's recent paintings, texts on light and darkness, and the daily news.
These short shows were cheer-up performances in the driveways of friends and neighbors, and for unsuspecting shoppers in the parking lots of local big box stores.
The May 22 performance of Declaration of Light is a “celebration of protest and resilience in the face of intolerable circumstances, and a passionate call for ‘underneath light...that...derives its power from its necessity, applying its divine strength where it is most needed.
The day will feature a Cheap Art sale from 3 pm through and after the show. Cheap Art, for those not in the know, is a tenet of the Bread & Puppet vibe. The Cheap Art manifesto on the theater troupe’s website spells out the why of selling inexpensive pieces of art.
“People have been thinking too long that art is a privilege of the museums and the rich. Art is not business. It does not belong to banks and fancy investors. Art is food. You can’t eat it but it feeds you. Art has to be cheap and available to everybody,” the manifesto reads in part.
“We’ll have the Cheap Art sale and food and drink and there will be an exhibition of Peter Shuman’s new tapestries about the Declaration of Light painted on sheets,” Bennett said.
The Camp Meade performance will be limited to 300 people and masks will be required. There will be ovals on the green with four chairs in each oval and six feet of distance between the ovals.