fall 2005 progams Puppet Theatre

EROTIC PUPPET THEATRE

Henry Monnier’s The Tart and the Student

A rare fifteen-minute performance of the nineteenth-century erotic puppet play The Tart and the Student (La Gisette et l’étudiant) by celebrated French satirist, artist, and playwright, Henry Monnier.

Henry Monnier (1799–1877) began his career during the Restoration and July Monarchy as a book illustrator and caricaturist, giving a vivid and faithful picture of French middle-class life in his albums and series of lithographs such as Moeurs administratives and Rencontres parisiennes. He excelled at vignettes of clerks and lawyers and portrayed the simple-minded joys of bourgeois family life. Monnier was also the creator of the immensely popular 19th century cartoon figure, Monsieur Prudhomme.

Performed first in the Erotikon Theatron in Paris in 1862, the play came out in a special limited edition in Brussels as L’Enfer de Joseph Prudhomme. Frightened at his own daring, Monnier denied the authorship of The Tart and the Student, even while he was reading all three roles.

Translated by Daniel Gerould, directed by Amy Trompetter, and performed by students from Barnard College. Presented in connection with the opening of the Monnier exhibition at The Graduate Center’s Art Gallery.

5:30 p.m., Monday, December 12, 2005, Martin E. Segal Theatre

Res. Code 6437. Free

SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND ENVIRONMENTAL PUPPETRY

An evening with Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater

The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 on New York City’s Lower East Side by Silesian-born sculptor and horeographer Peter Schumann. After a four-year residency at Goddard College, the Theater moved to its permanent home on a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont in 1974. Until 1998, an annual performance known as Our Domestic Resurrection Circus was held at the farm in late August, drawing crowds of up to 40,000. Now the Bread and Puppet Theater produces a lively ongoing summer season from June through the end of August with the help of an internship company. During the rest of the year, the Bread and Puppet Theater tours its indoor shows and massive outdoor spectacles in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Their pageants have a broad themeoriented appeal to large non-elite audiences. They address social, political, and environmental issues, or simply the common urgencies of our lives. Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater have received the Obie Award, the Erasmus Award from Amsterdam, the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the Puppeteers of America Award.

Moderated by Amy Trompetter, World Theatre Program, Barnard College, New York City.

6:30 p.m., Tuesday, December 13, 2005, Martin E. Segal Theatre

Res. Code 6438

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