Full Title: Shatterer-of-Worlds Chapel with Naturalization Services for Applicants Requesting Citizenship in the Shattered World: Bread & Puppet's Total Theatre presentation in celebration of its 50th Anniversary, this movie documents the entire epic performance/ritual that begins in the Dirt-Floor Cathedral with a quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita, quoted famously by J. Robert Oppenheimer on the eve of the first atomic bomb test: ..."I am become the Shatterer of Worlds"...
Conceptually, perhaps, an artist's attempt to illuminate the Paradoxical Nature of Reality / the enduring sense of Eternal Passage through Time. The sheer monumentality of ancient-ancestor puppets plays against a singular theatrical landscape populated with dream-like Boschian figures as if arisen from mass graves, or from the depths of primordial human Memory. This magnificent work echoes the existential intensity and hopelessness of a Nazi Death Camp, while it merges with images that may have been quoted from Goya's Disasters of War.
Peter Schumann's masterful post-Brechtian/ post-Modernist Agit-Prop Opera employs found-object and curiously-developed traditional instruments to orchestrate the breakdown sounds of our post-industrial global torpor and rank oppression, grinding & stretching into our own imaginative spheres, nurturing the exquisite and vulnerable human need to transcend the unbearable suffering of Endless War.
Audience and actors leave the theatre in solemn procession to the PIne Forest to burn the ..."Application for Citizenship in the Shattered World". There the invasive fear-driven, need-for-control-driven, illegal techniques of the National Security Agency (NSA) in creating a Global Surveillance Society are burnt, the ashes blown to the four winds. Ancient and solemn choral music pervades the air as Schumann proclaims:
"And now, Death, the Shatterer of Worlds, has become Life!
The splendor of a thousand suns blazing all at once,
Resembling the exalted soul."
The philosophical, moral, ethical concerns expressed by the transposition of text from its first utterance at the beginning of B&P's epic:
"Life, the splendor of 1000 suns blazing all at once,
resembling the exulted soul,
is become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds"
to its end in the text previously quoted are almost insuperable, almost unbridgeable, almost unimaginable! This transformative and visionary work inspires each of us to fierce celebration of our personal responsibility in stewardship of our brilliant planet, in the name of LIfe, Itself.
--Jerome Lipani
For more information: Jerome Lipani, Independent Artist <jeromelipani@gmail.com>.
