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College Theater will present Bread & Puppet Theater’s The National Circus of the Correct Moment 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Sept. 22-23 at the Williams Center for the Arts main stage. Tickets cost $6 and can be purchased by calling the box office at (610) 330-5009.
The Bread & Puppet Theater will be in residency at Lafayette for three days. Under the direction of the company’s founder Peter Schumann, the performance will involve members of the company and 50 students and other members of the Lafayette community. Schumann and his company developed The National Circus of the Correct Moment this past summer at the company’s headquarters in Glover, Vt.
“College Theater is presenting this event to give our students the opportunity to work with this distinguished and internationally known company,” says Michael O’Neill, director of theater. “By presenting Bread & Puppet during Family Weekend, we feel that students and their families will be able to see some exciting and thought-provoking theater.”
Bread & Puppet Theater is one of the nation’s oldest noncommercial, self-supporting theaters. Founded in 1963 in New York City, the theater company’s name derives from its practice of sharing its own fresh bread with the audience of each performance to create a sense of community and from its central principle that art should be as necessary to life as bread.
The theater company uses puppets that reach 10 to 15 feet tall to create politically and socially aware shows. A staple of the Vietnam antiwar protests, Bread & Puppet is still actively involved in political issues, including Sept. 11.
Born in Silesia, a historical region in central Europe located mostly in Poland, Schumann was a sculptor and dancer in Germany before coming to the United States in 1961. His wife, Elka, directs the Bread & Puppet Press, which produces posters, cards, and books on the theater company’s themes and other forms of “cheap art.”