John Bell – Peter Schumann’s Bedsheet Paintings

This article first appeared as John Bell, “Pictures and Puppet Performance: Peter Schumann’s Bedsheet Paintings.” Puppetry Research International 1.2 (2024): 1–24. This is an edited version of the original article.

Late in his life, and influenced by the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of his wife Elka, and his frustration with the persistence of US-supported wars around the world, Bread and Puppet Theater director Peter Schumann began a new phase in his art and theatre making by creating hundreds of paintings on discarded bedsheets, and then using them in different ways in Bread and Puppet productions of the early 2020s, especially productions focused on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The article argues that this reflects Bread and Puppet’s continuing interest in exploring new forms, as well as its recognition of such traditional forms of painting performance as cantastoria.

Bread and Puppet Theater occupies an unusual place in the world of theatre. Started sixty-one years ago in New York City by Peter Schumann—a German sculptor, painter, and dancer who had arrived in the United States in 1961 with his Russian/American wife Elka and four children—the company represents an aspect of 20th-century performance which has barely survived into the twenty-first: that of an independent, non-commercial traveling and stationary theatre which embraces social and political drama, incorporates objects, music, dance, and text in inventive ways, and centers on the impetus of a director who shapes the form and content of the work, particularly through the design of visual elements. Schumann’s recent focus on the performance possibilities of large-scale paintings as visual centerpieces of puppet shows is a dramatic, late-in-life innovation in form. But it is also in keeping with his vision of Bread and Puppet Theater as a constantly evolving performance medium combining objects, music, text, dance, and performers to tell stories re-presenting and commenting on the nature of contemporary social, personal, and political life (1).

Bread and Puppet and 1960s US Performance

As a director-oriented activist theatre company, Bread and Puppet [. . .] combines performers, dancers, and artists with sculptures, paintings, and live music, in actions with abnormal dramatic structures. [. . .] When he began his work in the mid-60s, Schumann specifically used puppets and masks, routinely told political stories, and rather than limit performances to galleries, lofts, and other indoor spaces, performed as needed on streets, sidewalks, playgrounds, courtyards, and parks.

Schumann’s work often took place in alternative theatre spaces, and included political content, non-realistic texts and characters, and poetic rather than realistic dialogue. [H]is shows regularly used choruses and narrators as central performers, particularly focused on masks and puppets as primary carriers of meaning, frequently used proscenium stages with wing-and-drop scenery and painted curtains. [. . .] Similar to 1960s US puppetry, Schumann’s work was fascinated by the modern possibilities of puppets as powerful performers of stories for adult audiences, appreciated the cultural power of global puppet traditions, often utilized fairytale dramaturgy, and celebrated puppetry as a combination of multiple art forms. But different from US puppetry of the time, Bread and Puppet shows augmented traditional forms of marionette, hand puppet, and rod puppet shows by using masks of all sizes, flat cut-out puppets, and giant puppets; used radical contrasts of scale (between the miniature and the gigantic); often used large performance spaces and large companies of eight to twelve performers rather than smaller puppet stages and small companies of one to three performers; introduced such new forms of object performance as crankies and cantastorias; performed stories about social injustice and war, including an implicit critique of US political norms; and (again) performed not only on indoor and outdoor puppet stages, but also on streets, in parks, and in other public spaces with such forms as parades, circuses, and pageants. So, while intimately related to trends in late 20th-century US performance, Bread and Puppet also created its own unique and (as it turns out) highly influential forms (2).

The distinct nature of Bread and Puppet Theater productions is especially evident in Schumann’s use of paintings and graphic designs as central elements of performance, including his most recent 2020s work with bedsheet paintings. Schumann’s early interests in sculpture easily shifted into the creation of masks and puppet heads, and his interests in dance also shifted easily into the creation of mask and puppet choreographies. But his interest in painting, drawing, woodcuts, and other forms of graphic design did not so easily morph into active theatricality. His woodcut banners could be used in parades and gallery installations, and he could use his drawing skills to create long paper panoramas for crankies. Larger-scale paintings could be used as scenic backdrops and legs in proscenium-arch wing-and-drop stages, or as the bodies of giant puppets But it was not until the 2020s that Schumann’s paintings began to take center stage as active elements in Bread and Puppet productions, in a period coincident with the COVID-19 pandemic, US-funded wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the death of Schumann’s wife and long-time partner Elka Schumann, and his stark recognition of his own mortality. Supported by a dynamic, international performing company of talented, young puppeteers; the infrastructure of the Bread and Puppet Farm in Glover, Vermont; income-producing summer performances there and equally remunerative traveling shows the rest of the year; and the robust income stream of the Bread and Puppet Press, Schumann has been able to develop multiple new productions that explore the theatrical presence of the bedsheet paintings as centers of puppet-theatre action.

Bedsheet Paintings and the COVID-19 Era

From 2020 to 2023, Peter Schumann has created over 600 large-scale paintings on recycled bedsheets, many of which he has then incorporated into a series of large and small theatre productions, parades, pageants, and exhibitions. [. . .] This new work reflects the nature of his late-in-life experience of personal loss, the COVID-19 pandemic and a deepening sense of frustration with the state of US government policies and our organized violence around the world.

Schumann approaches this project with a fury of energy unusual for an artist in their late eighties, in an almost daily practice. Working alone in a small studio next to his house in Glover, Schumann staples a clean bedsheet to the plywood studio wall, and then allows the developing movements of hand, brush, and acrylic paint on cloth to guide his emerging designs. To this writer’s unsophisticated eye, the paintings seem to emerge from a kind of stream of visual consciousness inspired by the daily news he sees and hears, as well as poetic and philosophical texts. His paintings have always reflected an expressionist style that he has made his own, as well as specific influences from such artists as the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald (1470–1528), whose version of Mary Magdalene’s praying hands in the Isenheim Altarpiece is refracted again and again in the bedsheet paintings. Schumann develops images of nature, modern society, and war in a strikingly colorful palette, in contrast to some earlier monochromatic modes of work focused on either black, gray, blue, brown, or red. Perhaps like a dramatist sketching out bits of dialogue for a play, Schumann uses the paintings to develop ideas and images he then develops: as themes for new productions or specific scenes in those productions; as performing objects to be used in specific scenes; and, in printed form, as the content of Bread and Puppet publications (3).

The imposed isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 shut down Bread and Puppet’s public performance possibilities, and the death of Peter’s wife and partner Elka Schumann in August 2021 was a further life challenge (4).Schumann found solace and energy through his painting, which he could do in safety in the relative isolation of his home studio.

As a Bread and Puppet Theater database of the bedsheet paintings reveals, early series in 2020 and 2021 addressed a familiar variety of Schumann’s ongoing concerns: rye bread, mechanized warfare, “How to Grow Tomatoes,” and the differences between “Essentialist” forces such as sunrises and “Non-Essentialist” human activities of political domination, bureaucracy, and mechanized warfare (5). As the bedsheet painting series progressed throughout 2021, Schumann began to focus on specific themes. A “Handout” series of thirty-one paintings included giant hands dominating landscapes or domestic scenes; these particularly made use of Grünewald’s proto-expressionist image of Mary Magdalene’s praying hands in the Crucifixion scene of the early sixteenth-century Isenheim Altarpiece, an image which Schumann had quoted as early as the 1970s in his Fourteen Stations of the Cross passion play. Other 2021 series addressed such subjects as “Obligations” (the forty paintings in that series included “Angry Obligation,” “Anti-War Obligation,” “Excellent Abnormality Obligation,” and “Mother Earth Obligation”); “Ecstatic Decrepitude” (comments on aging); “Delphinium Revolution” (in which lush images of the flowers complement hands holding red “Revolution” banners); and “Crucifixions.” A thirteen-painting series focused on Schumann’s production of Aeschylus’s play The Persians, which was developed in the summer of 2021, and performed in Vermont, Chicago, New York, and Connecticut.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Schumann focused more of his attention to that organized violence, from a perspective highly critical of US and NATO positions. Such banners included “Exit,” featuring a giant skeleton leaning over a white door labeled “Exit;” and “The Disruption of Everything Has Already Started,” which features nine disembodied white legs trampling over another white door. Later bedsheet series that year focused more specifically on the war in Ukraine [. . .] Schumann’s suspicion of NATO and US intentions in the Ukraine War was unusual on the American left [. . .] Figure 13. Peter Schumann’s bedsheet painting “The Disruption of Everything Has Already Started,” #10 of his “Finished Waiting” series, performed with paper-maché relief puppets in the Bread and Puppet production Finished Waiting in March 2022 at First Church in Cambridge, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Photo: John Bell)

Schumann continued to address a variety of themes from 2022 into 2023, such as the Russian anarchist visionary Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), who would become the focus of the 2023 touring production Inflammatory Earthling Rants (with Help from Kropotkin), as well as a theme of that summer’s main Bread and Puppet event, The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant; and the character “Mother Dirt”, who in Schumann’s work appears as an all-powerful force of Nature, both as the repository of the dead and the source of regenerative life. A production featuring Mother Dirt was developed as a summer 2023 indoor show in Bread and Puppet’s Paper Maché Cathedral in Glover [. . .] Over the summer and fall of 2023, Schumann’s painting continued to focus on Kropotkin (a less volatile subject than the immediacy of the Ukraine War); a whimsical series of fifteen “Unite” paintings riffing on Karl Marx’s “Workers of the World Unite!” slogan from the Communist Manifesto (Schumann’s variations included “Dust of the World Unite,” “Storms of the World Unite Against Stupid Capitalism,” and “Peepers and Poopers of the World Unite Against the Real Shit”); and twenty-five “Heart of the Matter” paintings, a series featuring bright red hearts in various situations (on a ladder, broken in two, as the torsos of humans, in the palms of hands, etc.). By early October, a series of twenty-three “Diptych” banners took on an almost formal tone, as Schumann experimented with the horizontal breadth of two sheets side by side, and a limited gray, black, and white palette.

Then came the October 7 Hamas attacks from Gaza on Israeli civilians and soldiers, and Israel’s crushing response, not only against Palestinian combatants, but also thousands of Palestinian civilians, and aerial bombardment flattening two-thirds of all the structures in northern Gaza. This destruction and death, made possible in large part by United States funds, touched a deep nerve in Schumann. It is safe to say that all of Peter Schumann’s work has, in one way or another, been informed by his traumatic experiences as a child in Germany during World War II—experiencing aerial bombardment, life as a wartime refugee, and seeing the bodies of Allied soldiers washed ashore after their prison ship had been bombed by Allied planes. In November 2023, during a personal discussion of the war in Israel and Gaza, Schumann remarked with deep exasperation and frustration that ever since 1961, when he had arrived in the US, the United States had been at war somewhere around the world: in Vietnam, Central America, or the Middle East. This frustration with what he sees as the United States’ permanent state of war became palpable in his next bedsheet painting series, entitled “Genocide,” some of which he used in productions created through the end of 2023 and early 2024, including more performances of the Mother Dirt Mass in Glover, participation in street protests against the Israel-Gaza war in New England, and performances in New York City of The Idiots of the World Unite Against the Idiot System Circus and The Mother Dirt Mass (6).

Bedsheet Paintings in Performance

Schumann’s bedsheet paintings are a striking accomplishment of visual art, but like other aspects of the Bread and Puppet director’s artwork, they also function as performing objects in puppet shows, workshops, and exhibitions. In addition, the bedsheet paintings seem to play a new and innovative role in Schumann’s theatre making, different from the processes he has followed in previous decades. Schumann’s drawings, paintings, and woodcuts have always been functional elements in the development of theatre productions, not only as scenic presences in those productions, but sometimes instead as two-dimensional evocations of what would become three-dimensional puppet designs, sketches of scenographic moments or choreographies, or tonal and emotional referents for particular scenes. However, in rehearsal processes building scenes for new shows, Schumann’s primary focus has typically been on how combinations of performers, masks, puppets, texts, and music can create particular scenes to function in succession to tell a complete story. The advent of the bedsheet paintings (to my mind, as a longtime observer of Bread and Puppet processes) marks a kind of shift in method, as the paintings themselves begin to appear as active elements in Bread and Puppet shows.

I wonder if this shift reflects a change in Schumann’s priority of interests, which over the years have balanced dance, mask work, puppet manipulation, music, texts, and different scales and structures of performance (street shows, pageants, circuses, proscenium stages, parades, operas, masses)? As a dancer in his 80s, Schumann might have found it harder to embody the kinds of movement he invented in his 30s; as a sculptor, it might be that working with loads of heavy clay is more of a chore than it used to be. Working now with companies of young, talented puppeteers sixty years or so younger than him is probably more challenging than dynamics at play in the 1960s and 70s, when his collaborators were his own age, or only a decade or two younger. Perhaps the option of quiet, solitary art work with brushes, paint, and blank bedsheets simply makes sense at this time of life?

Whatever the reasons, this period of bedsheet painting has also helped create a particular period in Schumann’s theatre work, one that foregrounds the possibilities of paintings as performing objects. [. . .B]edsheet paintings have performed in Bread and Puppet productions from 2021 to 2023, as content-defining backdrops; cantastoria images; narrated centerpieces of exhibitions; text and character sources; and kinetic, puppet-like actants in collaboration with performers.

Paintings as Cantastoria

Schumann’s bedsheet paintings have also functioned in a role more traditional for Bread and Puppet, as cantastoria images narrated by puppeteers, sometimes as elements of larger shows. The related international picture performance traditions of cantastoria (Italy), bänkelsang (Germany), par (India), parda-dari (Iran), pien (China), etoki (Japan), and wayang beber (Indonesia) all involve the performance of images through sung or spoken narration by performers who point to specific parts of the paintings during their storytelling (7). Bread and Puppet Theater’s 1971 anti-war cantastoria, Hallelujah—perhaps its most well-known adaptation of the form—includes masks, puppets, singing choruses, and texts in multiple languages, and initiated Peter Schumann’s continuing exploration of the form as a fast and direct way of storytelling through images.

 

Conclusion: Bedsheet Paintings and the Necessary Re-invention of Puppetry

An important aspect of 21st-century puppetry is the way its techniques continue to expand and transform. No longer limited to Western-oriented forms of marionettes, hand puppets, and rod puppets, the definition of puppetry is now enmeshed in a larger realm of “performing objects” which includes a wider range of global cultural traditions, new mechanical and digital technologies, and philosophical examinations of “things” and “matter” as actants. In the puppet world, combinations of shadow theatre with video projection and digital animation have become common; and the inclusion of crankies in puppet slams and in crankie festivals across the US also marks the increased variety of forms connected to puppetry. In the film world, adventure epics routinely combine massive and dynamic pictorial backgrounds as the green-screen contexts in which actors (often masked or combined with puppets) perform spectacular actions with mythic aspirations.

Schumann’s own approaches to puppetry over the past sixty years have marked a particular low-tech, DIY version of this, and his recent bedsheet painting productions are a development in the picture-performance modes he has been working with since he introduced the crankie to US theatre in the 1960s, made woodcut banners theatrical actants in parades and stationary performances, and developed the cantastoria as a dynamic modern storytelling device. Schumann’s bedsheet paintings, like other aspects of his work over the past sixty years, reflect his personal, political, and philosophic concerns, as well as his changing fields of interest in terms of media (painting, sculpture, drawing, music, dance, writing); and thus are particularly challenging to analyze as theatre and performance: while one might want to consider Bread and Puppet productions by their influential technical and dramaturgical innovations, one is inevitably forced (as this article shows) to also consider the complexities of Schumann’s embrace of political theatre as an artistic mode. One realizes such complications come with the territory of puppet performance, which in global historical contexts are always also deeply connected with religion, ritual, political ideology, and the irresistible urge of puppets to criticize and comment on the status quo.

Peter Schumann’s recent productions with bedsheet paintings as consistent and dynamic centers of attention underline his sense of puppet performance as a site of constant innovation, and call to mind his repeated advice to puppeteers during the creation of new productions that “it hasn’t been invented yet.” This sense of the necessity of re-thinking and re-inventing is not only a notable achievement for an artist in his ninetieth year, but moreover a useful marker for the goals of puppetry in the 21st-century.

 

Notes

1. Photographs of most of Peter Schumann’s bedsheet paintings are documented in the following publications he has authored:

Bedsheet Mitigations (Burlington: Fomite Press, 2020).
Handouts and Obligations (Burlington: Fomite Press, 2021).
Declaration of Light (Burlington: Fomite Press, 2021).
Kropotkin Says (Burlington, Fomite Press, 2023).
Gaza Genocide Bedsheets (Burlington: Fomite Press, 2023).

2. There are numerous resources about Bread and Puppet Theater, as one might expect about a sixty-year-old theatre company. See the References list below for some of these resources.
3. Most aspects of Bread and Puppet production design reflect Peter Schumann’s own specific aesthetic approach, while the actual construction of puppets, masks, and their structures and costumes is largely a group effort. The bedsheet paintings are a solo project by Schumann as painter, although the ways they are used in performance are developed in collaborative rehearsals with his puppeteer colleagues.
4. See Max Schumann, “Elka Schumann In Memoriam,” Bread and Puppet webpage (2021).
5. Schumann’s bedsheet paintings have also been documented in a “Bedsheet Database” spreadsheet in a Bread and Puppet Google Drive by company members Ziggy Bird Mackenzie and Raphael Royer. The database is organized by year and series, and includes titles, images, quotations, and other information. Here is a list of the series titles, by year (from 2020 through 2023) and the number of paintings comprising each series: a total of 639 paintings.
6. Schumann’s 2023 Gaza paintings were published as Gaza Genocide Bedsheets (see Endnote 1). For a review of the publication, see Ron Jacobs, “Gaza in Art, Anguish and Anger,” Counterpunch 12 January 12 2024.
7. On the global history of picture performance and cantastoria, see Victor H. Mair, Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989).

References

There are numerous references about Bread and Puppet Theater, as one might expect about a sixty-year-old theatre company. Here are a few such resources, annotated:

Books and Articles

Bell, John. “The End of Our Domestic Resurrection Circus: Bread and Puppet’s Counterculture Performance in the 1990s.” TDR 43.3 (Fall 1999): 62–80. A look at the development of Bread and Puppet’s annual outdoor performance event from 1970 to 1998.

Bell, John. “The Influence of Bread and Puppet Theater.” In Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies, edited by James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal, 377–410. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. A review of puppeteers and artists influenced by Bread and Puppet.

Bell, John. Landscape and Desire: Bread and Puppet Pageants in the 1990s. Glover, Vermont: Bread and Puppet Press, 1997. An analysis of Peter Schumann’s giant outdoor puppet pageants.

Brecht, Stefan. Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre (2 vols.). London/New York: Methuen/Routledge, 1988. An extensive two-volume study of Bread and Puppet, from its beginnings to the mid-1980s.

Schumann, Peter. “What, at the End of This Century, Is the Situation of Puppets & Performing Objects?” TDR 43.3 (Fall 1999): 56–61.

Schumann, Peter. A Lecture to Art Students at SUNY/Purchase New York. Glover, Vermont: Bread and Puppet Theater, 1987. A manifesto espousing non-corporate and “cheap” art making.

Schumann, Peter. The Radicality of the Puppet Theater. Glover, Vermont: Bread and Puppet Press, 1990. A manifesto articulating central tenets of Schumann’s approach to puppetry.

Schumann, Peter. The Old Art of Puppetry in the New World Order. Glover, Vermont: Bread and Puppet Press, 1993. A fiddle-lecture manifesto about the possibilities of activist puppetry at the time of the Gulf War.

Strauss, Skye. “A Meditation on Loss.” Performing Arts Journal 45.1 (January 2023): 48–51. A review of Bread and Puppet’s The Persians as performed at the 2022 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival.

Films and Videos

Halleck, DeeDee, and George Griffin, dir. The Meadows Green. 1974. Available on the Internet Archive. A lyrical documentation of Bread and Puppet’s last Domestic Resurrection Circus at Goddard College’s Cate Farm, in 1974.

Farber, Jeff, dir. Brother Bread, Sister Puppet. 1992. Available on the Internet Archive. A documentary film about Domestic Resurrection Circuses in Glover, Vermont, in the early 1990s.

Halleck, DeeDee, and Schumann, Tamar, dir. Ah! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet. 2002. Available on the Internet Archive. Documenting many years of Bread and Puppet outdoor events in Glover, Vermont, including interviews, rehearsals, and performance footage.

Lipani, Jerome, filmmaker. Bread and Puppet YouTube channel (2014-present). A collection of over ninety videos from 2014 to the present, documenting Bread and Puppet Theater and related performances.

 

John Bell is the Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and an Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts, both at the University of Connecticut. He was a company member of the Bread and Puppet Theater from 1975 to 1985, and received his Ph.D. degree in theater history at Columbia University in 1993. He is a member of Brooklyn’s Great Small Works theatre collective, and a co-founder of the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands. He plays trombone with the Good Trouble Brass Band of Somerville, Massachusetts.

Gray Lady Cantata #9 and The Possibilitarian Everything Imperatives Show were created by Bread and Puppet Theater, directed by Peter Schumann, with thanks to Trudi Cohen and Maura Gahan

 

To hear some of Peter’s post-election thinking, see the interview in Quincy Saul, “Peter Schuman at 90: ‘I’m a Papier-Mâché Revolutionary!‘” Counterpunch 21 February 2025.

 

 

Bread and Puppet Theater will be performing The Obligation to Live on 26 and 27 April, 10 Mayo St., Portland.