Michael Bielawski
By Michael Bielawski
PLAINFIELD — For the second weekend of July in Plainfield, all things “Bread and Puppet” will be celebrated by locals and visitors alike.
The main event is two showings of a short film entitled “An Artist Responds to War” about artist and theater director Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater. The film showings will be at the Haybarn Theater at 4 p.m. on July 11 and at the Plainfield Town Hall Opera House at 3 p.m. on July 12. The film is directed by Vermont-based documentary filmmaker Robbie Leppzer of Turning Tide Films.
“It’s very focused on those four years, from 1970 to 1974 [when Bread and Puppet made Plainfield’s Goddard College home], so the whole event is called “Bread and Puppet’s Plainfield Years,” said Plainfield resident Michael Billingsley.
The world premiere screening took place at the Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro on May 3 and drew an estimated 220 people. It’s expected that tickets will sell out for the Plainfield shows.
Billingsley said the showings in Plainfield will be a standalone portion of the larger project.
“An Artist Responds to War” is the first of two films that Leppzer is making. He’s currently in the midst of editing “Bread and Puppet: The Theater of Peter Schumann,” a feature-length documentary about the full life-story of Schumann and the 63-year history of the Bread and Puppet Theater, which will be released in 2027.
Leppzer said he first saw Bread and Puppet in 1984 when he was invited to show a documentary he was making about U.S. peace activists in Nicaragua. Bread and Puppet was also doing a show in solidarity with the people of South America.
“It just blew my mind that you could use these giant puppets and hundreds of performers to make really powerful statements about social justice and social change,” he said. “So at that point I decided, at some point in the future I will make a film about Bread and Puppet.”
Within the film, Schumann describes his passion for art and activism.
“I paint almost every day. I paint very fast. Fast and furious,” he said. “As I work on it, I usually change it completely. I do to a certain section of it. I work, then I say ‘stop it, no,’ smoke a cigar first. And then I go back to it and then I change it.”
The film notes that in response to the military actions in Palestine by Israel, Schumann “paints over 100 paintings and directs several new theater productions in protest to this war.”
Schumann also says, “I’m a child of Nazi Germany. You know the horrors of that, that’s in my bones. This is acceptable what’s happening where one nation commits genocide on another one right in front of our eyes?”
In addition to the film screenings, there will be a series of Bread and Puppet-related events throughout town over the same weekend. Billingsley said both former Goddard students and Bread and Puppet veterans from that era — some who haven’t returned to Plainfield for a very long time — will travel great distances to participate.
“It started to snowball, there are more and more things that came to mind that we thought might be cool to do,” Billingsley said.
Each day there is a guided tour of the former Goddard College campus by archivist David Hale. There will be paintings and other projects featured by Schumann.
There will be music at the Grace United Methodist Church performed by the Montpelier Community Gospel Choir. And there will be the screening of another short film, a 4K digitally remastered “The Meadows Green” directed by Dee Dee Halleck and George Griffin, which chronicled a 1974 Bread and Puppet performance at Goddard College.
The event will tie in with the nation’s 250th birthday. A note of significance is that Schumann performed at Plainfield’s Fourth of July celebration for the nation’s 200th anniversary, walking ten-feet high on stilts through town, leading a contingent of Bread and Puppet musicians and performers, as part of the July 4 parade then.
All three of Plainfield’s restaurants, The Haybarn, Outer Spice, and Positive Pie, are expected to be open extra hours.
See the Turning Tide Films’ page for event details.
