What mattered most was how the work was made. Productions are collaborative, built through shared labour and the free exchange of ideas. The community reaches well beyond the company, too. In Vermont and abroad, many shows welcome volunteer participants into the performance itself. Puppets, masks, collaboration, community: this way of performing showed me a means of telling important stories out loud, together.

Several pieces remain vivid. In 2000, for the Domestic Resurrection Circus, I led four stilt-walkers beneath a giant dragon puppet. The dragon was a patchwork of red, olive green, and pink gingham, its papier-mâché head painted fierce. Towering above an audience seated in the grass, we advanced. A dragon slayer in a silver helmet charged, sword raised. Then we flung the dragon over our heads, roaring. Warriors stood revealed, blades aloft. The slayer fled. The dragon, it turned out, had been hiding better company.

In another performance I helped operate a giant white bird. It first appeared on a grassy rise above the amphitheatre. Three of us ran downhill, poles aloft, cloth wings gulping air against a wall of dark trees. Later, before the audience, I raised the wing again: fringed white cloth stretched overhead, cut-out clouds drifted below, musicians played. To operate a wing is to lend yourself to a story larger than one body, and to trust the others holding up the rest of it.

Those years changed me and my life. Bread and Puppet challenged me to grow, and to change in big ways. It encouraged me to be brave and set me on the path to a life working with people and clothing. I arrived as an artist and graduate student and left a bolder, louder, more fearless artist, certain that creativity and collaboration need to be central tenets of my creative practice. I am endlessly grateful to everyone I worked with at that point in my life, and I carry what they gave me into everything I make.

Bread and Puppet

Performer

While I was working on my PhD, I ran away for a few years and joined a circus.

Not just any circus: The Bread and Puppet Theater, founded by Peter and Elka Schumann in 1963 on New York’s Lower East Side. Still active today, it stands among the oldest nonprofit political theatres in the United States. Giant puppets stride through streets. Sculpture, music, dance, and language tumble together into one wild, thoughtful political artistic practice. In the 1970s the troupe settled on a farm in Glover, Vermont, where a core company of puppeteers joined by committed participants from the local community swells over the summer months into dozens (sometimes reaching into the hundreds) of international performers. During the other month of the year Bread and Puppet internationally.

From 1999 to 2002 I worked with the theater, and it changed my life, personally and creatively. It taught me to be brave. It taught me to dance on stilts, head to toe in shades of pink. It encouraged me to be strong, big, and loud, literally, in performance, and also in how I understood myself and my work. Those traits shaped my personal and creative subjectivity, and I carry them still.

I performed, operating puppets in original productions that grew from political, community-based traditions. I made prints supporting the company’s performances. And I spent days in the theater’s massive costume room, where I learned a life-changing lesson: everyday creativity was, and remains, essential to my life. Those days also helped set my professional path. Clothing and costuming became, and remain, my number one passion.

In a different piece I donned a dark suit to play the stern face of corporate capitalism. My spine stayed rigid, my gaze level, not a smile in sight. Authority, I learned, needs very little costume: a jacket, a stance, a refusal to grin. Beside me, performers in white made the contrast plain.