Bread and Puppet is a radical puppetry group that has been producing large-scale performances since the 1960s. The group is so named for the combination of fresh bread and puppets that their audiences enjoyed when the troop was in their original loft location in the Lower East Side of New York City.

In the 1970s Bread and Puppet moved to Vermont where their performances took on a greater scale in the outdoors every summer. Hundreds of volunteer performers (many in giant group costumes) perform for thousands of audience members.

The puppet activists address issues such as corruption, war, education, love, health, animal cruelty, and the environment. This collection of videos features outdoor performances and rehearsals large and small. A number of videos in this collection feature small indoor musical performances and rehearsals as well.

The archive is almost 200 hours long and is the raw hand-held rough record of 10 years of the Bread and Puppet’s big summer circuses. The record is not only the performances, but the life and work of the people who were the makers of the shows: the community of cooks and carpenters, gardeners and dishwashers, staplers and stitchers, poets and paper masheyers, bakers and bean counters, singers and salad makers, whistlers and weed wackers, who came every summer to live and create beneath the indigo skies of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. Martin Luther King Junior once spoke of a "beloved community": “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being….” The battle isn’t over. But Bread and Puppet’s power is the very real creation of those new relationships in the green Vermont hills. This archive is the proof. These images are not edited, but are attached one to another by the common love that pervades the creative activities of this uniquely beloved community.