performance art

Host Mariah Riggs interviews Trish Denton, the Founder and Artistic Director of In Tandem Arts, a local arts organization incubating participatory, interdisciplinary, and community-based performances. Trish discusses her influences as an artist and changemaker, and an overview of the programs at In Tandem Arts. 

For more information visit: www.intandemarts.com

Vital Action - Radically Illuminative Public Art *
This film documents the February 7 & 8 Unveiling Walkabout Tour of Montreal's Outremont upscale & utilitarian shops' windows in a very large-scale Bread and Puppet win: Marionettes en Vitrines! This is Bread and Puppet in collaboration with Casteliers.ca. Peter's performance of the Furious Art / L'Art Enragé Fiddle Rant underscores the Photojourney/ Parcours on foot in winter streets of Montreal tour of some 30 vitrines filled with archival photos, ironically-placed puppets, bedsheets, prints with informed performance/exhibition provenance by co-curators Alexis Smith and Pavla Mano employing photography by some 17 longtime B&P and Castiliers.ca artists and some 570 pieces spanning more than a half-century of Peter Schumann's & collaborators' creation.

The 17th Casteliers Festival of radical puppetry will be held March 2 through March 6, 2022 in Montreal. Festival performance schedule can be accessed at festival.casteliers.ca

The Castelier production team offered Schumann the extraordinary opportunity to merge activist art with daily, ordinary life in a cosmopolitan & internationalist multi-cultural city. His "EXCEPTIONALLY WONDROUSLY ORDINARY" written in blue letters on a Bedsheet surmounted by a headless Suit with dangling necktie is a deeply chilling moment of perhaps the major vitrine staged in the city. Huge windows of expressionist/archetypal figures meet the Circus zebra & comic chimera puppet as they face into a major thoroughfare with heavy car and 18-wheeler traffic.

* For more information: breadandpuppet.org and festival.casteliers.ca
   -- JL

This film documents a significant virtual collaboration between Peter Schumann, painter, sculptor, baker, choreographer, musician and director of the Bread & Puppet Theatre with other Vermont artists in celebration of his work exhibited in three locations along the Ski and Snowshoe Art Trail, a Winter Season Outdoor Installation at Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro, Vermont.

Featured here in grottoes created in the trees along the Open Air Gallery are Peter Schumann’s Spring 2020 4' x 8' Masonite Prints which mark the beginnings of the B&P integral Theatre/Painting/Circus season of 2020, Insurrection + Resurrection Services. This theme morphed from the original Pine Forest Memorial Village socially-distanced outdoor Spring performances into the Summer Insurrection + Resurrection Services Circus in a transformative series of ever-evolving pieces at Bread and Puppet which included roaming Pageants and Parades to the Museum and to the Papier-Mache Cathedral into the Fall of 2020.

Also on the Trail are a series of Schumann's painted cement cast sculptures - Lamentation Road - from where we proceed to his very recent Handouts series, four 10'x12' paintings mounted on the outside wall of the HCA. Here a filmically transformative event occurs when Roy MacNeil's synthesis of video with his original musical interpretation of the words written on Schumann's Handouts paintings begins with his establishing the rhythm of this section by using one of the prints, the "Me" print, as a found-object instrument. This beat becomes a song executed with his sister Mavis MacNeil & accompanied by his own violin & voice as his filmic dance to Schumann's words is sung in a movement which could be marked Allegro Spontaneo! The sheer Joyousness of this sequence offers sharp contrast to Peter's deeply mournful & Expressionist performance of the Fiddle Rant during the earlier section depicting the Insurrection + Resurrection Services banners.

These excerpts of Schumann's work this year, which include the Masonite Prints, Bedsheet Mitigations, Insurrection Obligations and Handouts plus Fiddle Rants all contribute to the ongoing Coronavirus emergency theme: Insurrection-Lamentation-Resurrection.

Documentary on the Performance named Spirit - The Seventh Fire