The Diagonal Life Circus is a raucous, colorful giant puppet spectacle that sheds light on our current precariously diagonal condition – on the verge of collapse, yet always capable of uprising.
“Reality is either horizontal or vertical or both,” says Bread & Puppet Director Peter Schumann. “The horizontal produces us, and eventually takes us back into its giant arms’ embrace. The vertical is the exceptional human predicament, the up- and forward-striding ambition that makes history and warfare. The diagonal results from the hurts that the vertical suffers in the process. It is our common human fate, the hard-to-sustain-in-between life, neither up nor down that needs to muster all its strength to lift itself up and the courage to invent tricks that keep it from falling. And this trickery deserves a circus, to celebrate the inventiveness of the struggling body and mind in the fight against falling, as well as a victory feast for the successful lifting itself up.”
As always, the Circus will feature the riotous Bread and Puppet Brass Band, stilters, flags, and the whole roaring, squawking, whinnying papier-maché menagerie, attempting to speak to the urgent heart of the moment.
After the show, Bread and Puppet will serve its famous sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread and Puppet’s “Cheap Art” – books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread and Puppet Press – will be for sale.
Suggested donation: $10-$25. No-one turned away for lack of funds.