Revisiting the Sixties and Refusing Trash: Preamble to and Interview with Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater

This essay frames an extended 2008 interview with Peter Schumann, founder and director of the Bread and Puppet Theater collective, through a discussion of how the sixties spread like wildfire across the world. The author rescues the sixties' understanding that liberation could only be achieved through the liberation of the body from revisionist histories that downplay the era's stunning political achievements. The enormous success sixties' activists had in mobilizing millions (“people power”) resulted from the coupling of theory and action through music, art, ritual, and theater. The article discusses two theaters: one in Honduras (Teatro Basura) and one in Vermont (Bread and Puppet Theater), both of which were greatly influenced by Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which stressed recycling, making do with what is at hand, and underlined the importance of local and native epistemologies.