| Summary: | Peter Schumann's creative method and his Bread and Puppet plays reflect his belief that theatre is spiritually important and as necessary as food. His process and products are founded on noncommercial attitudes and practices, and very little difference between the performers' daily lives and their artistic lives can be found in the work. === Part I of this study provides a picture of the development of the Bread and Puppet Theatre and its work. This history is discussed in three major periods which cover the troupe's initial work in New York City in 1961 to the disbanding of large group work on Cate Farm in 1974. Summaries at the end of each of these chapters enumerate the most important dynamics and developments in Schumann's creative process and its products. Twenty-eight pages of photographs, detailed descriptions of representative plays from each of the three major periods, the author's taped interviews with Schumann and the puppeteers, and his observations of rehearsals and performances are utilized to aid the reader's sense of the plays and the working process. The final chapter of Part I gives a profile of Schumann, his troupe, and his philosophies, including his aversion to the idea of a professional theatre and the nonacting performance style of his puppeteers. === Part II describes and analyses Schumann's unique creative process and his unusual mixture of sculptured shapes, movement, sound, and space or location. From this analysis the author codifies a set of seven creative principles inherent in Schumann's goal of gettting a communication: (I) Starting From An Intense Interest in One Element, (II) Combining Contradictory Elements, (III) Pushing the Extremes to Contradict Normal Expectations, (IV) Simplification, (V) Finding A Literal Action, (IV) Chance, (VII) Nonacting. The application of these principles to contemporary theatre training and production shows a connection with Piaget's research in human intelligence and with E. Paul Torrance's creativity theory. Further, these principles reflect significant aspects of child development, and therefore they have important implications for the organismic training of the actor. Schumann, like other rebellious figures in the development of contemporary theatre, contributes specifically and generally to our theatre's growing eclecticism. === Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-08, Section: A, page: 3347. === Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.
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