While the theater of our time is now for a decade devoted to the dreams of technical excellence, which should enrich the stage art, as well as our feelings and sensations, the director and artist Peter Schumann, the shaman-avant-gardist, the creator of the theater "Brad and Puppet" firmly stands on the opposite position. The tricks of technicalism are suspicious for him, he categorically refuses to believe in their favor to enhance and enhance the artistic effect. And even more so does not believe in the benefit of all these achievements of our rational civilization; for a normal and unspoiled person, all this is harmful or, at best, meaningless.
And when scenographers from all over the world plant computer graphics for the art of scenography, and even intend to replace it with this computer graphics, Peter Shuman draws a house with a broad shaggy brush on a piece of cloth (does it mean that there is not and cannot be a single nylon in that canvas thread?). Draws in the manner that is characteristic of children. However, not all children in a row, but only serious and responsible for their actions. Such serious and responsible are also found among adults.
I hasten to inform - Schumann refuses the latest technologies not due to cultural backwardness, rather, on the contrary. For what reason - I will try to explain in the future.
Before I say: among other things, he is wary of speculations that can cloud the true purpose of the puppet theater - his own theater is even called "Brad and Puppet," and the doll was at the epicenter of his work and his philosophy.
A German, an avant-garde artist. The nonconformist is by its very nature. He lives in America, which he considers unfit for living here. Not leaving the country, he managed to organize his emigration - he emigrated to a farm in the state of Vermont, where he, his wife and his theater live as they see fit, without considering as much as possible with... but, strictly speaking, I find it difficult to determine what it does not count. He hardly watches hundreds of TV programs, but he reads newspapers and even knows how to use newspaper language. It's unlikely that he is aware of the affairs with which the near world lives, but he closely follows the world's evil: where it is particularly rampant at the moment. Most recently, he visited his theater in such hot spots, but not for the purpose that our front-line actors had, his goal is strategic: by arranging exactly this, his own artistic action, he hopes world evil if not to destroy, then at least pacify.
Even from this brief sketch, you can understand that for some reason he defined himself as the guardian of the oldest precepts of antiquity, believing in the magic of art with such selflessness, to which only a sober and rational mind is capable. Although the reason for such a position is quite transparent: it is the ardent avant-gardist, if he is frank, knows no guile and is completely outrageous, sooner or later he will look into the abyss, where the roots of all things will be revealed before him. It is known that in the cradle of the avant-gardist there may be a primordial idol. In Schumann it happened, but this is not an idol, but its author's unique and incapable of replicating Shuman's Doll. Initially, the sculptor, he became the director of his sculptures, he puts them into action and he accompanies them on the hills.
"BREAD AND PUPPET" - the doll of his actions, claiming the most active effectiveness, on his impact on the world, - raised to a majestic rank of biblical values, placed next to our daily bread. Bread in his theater is real, he bakes it himself, and this is a doubled effective action, which humanity called after the Biblical times with a play and a medicine.
He gets to the beginning of the beginning, to where the true essence of art could be hidden, and art itself was not yet in the world. But he who mastered the "true essence" communicated with the higher powers on which life on the earth depended, and she always hung in the balance. And if the hairs are still not torn, then the mediators between the sky and the people, eating their bread is not in vain. It was from them that the tribe of responsible artists went. More precisely, artists who voluntarily assume responsibility for the fate of the world.