Late at night after a Bread and Puppet show, we sat around our kitchen table with several puppeteers chatting over handfuls of leftover Halloween candy. I had noticed a certain presence from the Bread and Puppet members: a sense of ease and warmth that rubbed off on everyone they met. I found myself smiling more around them, talking and laughing freely, feeling more alive. After a round of Laffy Taffy jokes, I couldn’t help asking how they did it. What produced this sense of comfort, this easy joy and connection with others? The oldest of them laughed kindly and responded: “it’s just early in the tour.”
A fair response. But what exactly is it about Bread and Puppet that generates this feeling of comfortable humanity, this ease and presence in the world? My partner and I discussed this for weeks after they left. Of course, the answer is not hard to discern. They are a group of lovely people who live collectively on a farm and spend their days making beautiful art. A few times a year, a number of them pile into a painted old school bus to travel from town to town sharing their creations with the world. Bread and Puppet has been producing and sharing incredible art, puppets, theater, and (of course) bread since the 1960s, and their method works. They put an incredible amount of life into their art, which in turn sustains so many thousands of people. My own house is filled with Bread and Puppet art that brings me daily joy.
Of course, not all of us can spend our days making art on a collective farm in Vermont. How can we find a similar sense of happiness and fulfillment as do the puppeteers? It is perhaps a banal observation that some form of self-directed creative labor is key. Capitalism devalues our creative projects, forces them into niche “hobbies” to pursue in our precious little free time away from work. We find ourselves having to justify every hour spent on our projects—or conversely, we feel guilty when we don’t have time for them. As Marx pointed out so long ago in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the problem is that work under capitalism alienates us from our humanity and our sense of creative possibility. The only real solution is to collectively regain control over our time and labor.
Until then, making art and puppets seems like as good a way as any to find some happiness and relief from the soul sucking despair of the present. Puppets are also, as David Graeber reminds us, vital for fun and provocative demonstrations and for sustaining our culture of resistance. So a few weeks ago, in the doldrums of coronavirus melancholia, we at the Moth Mother Collective cleared out our garage of junk and transformed it into an art and puppet studio. (We have big plans for it to double as an infoshop space and pop-up zine distro in the future; stay tuned!) We’re still a little way out from finishing any puppets, but we are making progress. And I’ll tell you what: it feels good.
