Vermont’s own Bread and Puppet Theater gives a performance of Diagonal Life: Theory and Praxis, a new show examining humanity’s current precarious (diagonal) condition: on the verge of collapse, yet always capable of uprising.

“The vertical is the exceptional human predicament, the up and forward striding ambition that manufactures history and warfare,” says Peter Schumann, Bread and Puppet’s founder and director. “The diagonal results from the hurts that the verticals suffers in the process. It is our common human fate, the hard to sustain in-between-life, neither up nor down.”

We inhabitants of Western modernity are no strangers to verticality, from the architecture of our cities, to the “ladder(s) of success” we’re expected to scale, to the incessant wakefulness required of us, postponing the horizontal pleasures of sleep. Bread and Puppet’s Diagonal Life presents the diagonal as a potent and promising opposition to the dominating verticality of our culture.

Diagonal Life animates the humorous, tragic and bewildering possibilities of diagonality with song, dance, magic, mechanism, and stunning cardboard and paper maché puppets painted in Peter Schumann’s exuberant expressionist style.

After the show Bread and Puppet will serve its famous sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread and Puppet’s “Cheap Art” – books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread and Puppet Press – will be for sale.

Suggested Donation: $10-$25, no one turned away for lack of funds.