BREAD & PUPPET THEATER'S
THE UPSIDE DOWN WORLD CIRCUS

Join Mayo Street Arts at Fort Allen Park for an outdoor spectacle of puppets, protest, and celebration overlooking Casco Bay!

The one and only Bread & Puppet Circus is back to confront our upside-down situation with stilt dancers, paper maché beasts of all sizes, and a riotous brass band.

Is it or is it not?
Am I asleep or am I awake?
Am I a cockroach or am I a me?

Possibilitarians! We must demonstrate humanity’s upside-down situation in the face of the government’s depraved falsehoods. Luxury silence and despair must be replaced by revolt orchestras that radically oppose the radically wrong system.

It is time to unforget the revolution-in-progress and aim for the evermore on the universe’s shore.

After the performance, Bread & Puppet will serve its famous sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Cheap Art—books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread & Puppet Press—will be for sale.

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The performance is approximately 90 minutes. The band starts playing at 3:40 PM.

This is a free outdoor performance at Fort Allen Park on Portland’s Eastern Promenade (49 Eastern Promenade). A chair or blanket to sit on, sunscreen, and water are recommended.

Please bring cash to donate to the artists or you can donate ahead of time through this ticket page.

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Bread & Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police, and other problems of the neighborhood. More complex theater pieces followed, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners.

The puppets grew bigger and bigger. Annual presentations for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day often included children and adults from the community as participants. Many performances were done in the street. During the Vietnam War, Bread & Puppet staged block-long processions and pageants involving hundreds of people.

In 1974 Bread & Puppet moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The 140-year old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets. Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a two day outdoor festival of puppetry shows, was presented annually through 1998.

The company makes its income from touring new and old productions both on the American continent and abroad, and from sales of Bread & Puppet Press’ posters and publications. The traveling puppet shows range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company to extensive outdoor pageants which require the participation of many volunteers.

Today, Bread & Puppet continues to be one of the oldest, nonprofit, political theatre companies in the country.