Bread&Puppet_Peter Schumann_17th Festival de Casteliers_Marionettes en Vitrines!
Channel: Jerome Lipani
Date: 2022-02-16

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