Time and Space Limited in Hudson presents two separate performances by Peter Schumann’s legendary Bread & Puppet Theater on March 29 and 30. Notoriously radical and topical, Bread & Puppet is strongly associated with the activism of the counterculture, but was founded well before the height of the era, in the New York of the very early ’60s. Named for its habit of serving homemade bread to audiences (a physical expression of the notion that art is as essential to life as bread), Bread & Puppet took on very specific issues in its work, from the Vietnam War to the MOVE fiasco to the closing of nuclear power plants. Intellectuals like Howard Zinn and Andrei Codrescu have sung the praises of Bread & Puppet, and its players were among those famously arrested, SWAT-style, at the 2000 Republican Convention.
On Thursday, March 29, Bread & Puppet presents Cantastorias from the Possibilitarian Arsenal, a raucous career retrospective and manifesto of sorts. On Friday, March 30 at 7:30 p.m., Bread & Puppet presents The Basic Byebye Show. A series of quiet object fantasies unfolds in black, white and grey inside a small fabric stage printed with elementary words: “Resist,” “Bread,” “Yes,” “Sky,” “Riot,” “Byebye.” Outside, an orchestra of nonsense instruments plays. A birch forest grows. Sculpted clouds produce hands, chairs and rain. The storm passes. The episodes that make up The Basic Byebye Show develop in abstract counterpoint to periodic handkerchief-assisted “basic byebyes” to various brutal unnecessities of our current politics.
Admission to each show costs $15 general, $12.50 for TSL members and $10 for students and children. Time and Space Limited is located at 434 Columbia Street in Hudson. For more information, visit https://timeandspace.org.