what bread & puppet reminded me about ritual & politics

From the Labor Day newsletter:
​So I’m gonna try to relay this without telling you my life’s story - it was really so beautiful that I’m just going to go for it and if it’s too many words you can scroll on by to learn about the return of Fireside Restorative & Massage, and the last room for retreat, and Baja. 
One of many magical things in my hometown of  Middletown, Connecticut (so much like Mt. Airy!) is a youth theater called Oddfellows Playhouse, started by some Wesleyan students who had been deeply marked by their involvement with Bread & Puppet Theater in Vermont. I was one of the few teenagers working at the Oddfellows summer camp based on B&P who had never actually been there - and I finally went this last Sunday! (sorry to miss Monday classes - that's where I was.)
It was very much like a homecoming to be there, and not just because Dic Wheeler, the inimitable white afro big-hearted genius-clown director of Oddfellows was there too. But because I was just settling back into a unique concatenation I didn't know was so rare and precious: Commedia del Arte-style clowning, masks, puppetry, political change work, and the return of theater to its rightful spiritual home as communal ritual. Like, where else do hundreds of people travel through the woods to convene at a natural amphitheater to witness a mythic rendition of why we have become lodged in this particular cultural moment of gridlock and how to free ourselves from it? (Starting from God creating the world out of the cosmic soup, naturally.) Then to wander lost through a grove of pine trees with altars set up for the fallen victims of Gaza's horrors (pictured at top), while "actors" clad all in white read aloud the individual stories nailed to the trees? Then line up to join a somber procession through rolling fields to burn a giant 20-foot effigy of the world's evils (pictured above)?  What kind of heart/mind/soul built this thing, and how was I totally oblivious to how rare it was to get a taste of this vision at such a young age, in the racially and socio-economically diverse little city I grew up in? I didn't realize it wasn't common to see 7-year-old white faculty brats and black kids from the projects together learning to stilt-walk and juggle. And to experience the justice-engined heart of Bread & Puppet taken out of white Vermont and into the real world? I had no idea how lucky I was.
But there was this moment of rub, y'all! With all the work we've done in social justice circles to shift the blaming-and-shaming vibe so prevalent in the early 90's (don't get me going on this), still there was this micromoment when there was only a few minutes to finish painting the evils of the world onto the effigy, which we named communally by calling them out into the circle, and when I called out "ancestral curse," the  actor in the top hat paused and looked at me, and for just a heartbeat of a moment I saw a bewildered look pass across her face. You can see the other words on there: war, fascists, capitalism, trump, sycophants, propaganda, misogyny... do ancestral curses belong here in this particular assortment of evils? She saved the awkward moment by muttering as she painted on the words, "yeah, I was feeling that about my family this week too."
So I wandered off towards the amphitheater, feeling for the first and only time that homecoming-ish day a bit like a fish out of water. I was disoriented by a different kind of familiar - that frequent pickle of some neurospicy tidbit escaping out of my big mouth at the cocktail party, and hearing in my head the proverbial record scratch as everybody just kind of pauses like... who brought the weirdo? And I thought... we're still here? We're still in that moment where white folk can point angry fingers or self-flagellate about our complicity, but where it's considered self-indulgent to devote ourselves to healing or spiritual practice. How is it still unusual to approach the work of unraveling these tangles we're stuck in by reaching back towards their ancestral origins? There's still an unspoken conviction - at least on the East Coast - that the ancestral healing process belongs not in political spaces - even artistic ones - but instead in the private sphere of discussing our childhood trauma and maybe our families of origin with a trusted therapist.
STILL????!!!!
Even as we proclaim the importance of community, interdependence, and mutual aid, and curse siloed individualism, the prevalent view is still that holding patterns that show up in our bodies and hearts are about little ol' us and not really about our cultural inheritance. They are to be addressed in our solitary practices of yoga and meditation and ruthless self-examination. Maybe a racial affinity discussion group or a book club. That look of confusion on her face betrayed the outdated-but-nevertheless-lingering tenet that art is a metaphor and the real work is in the action we all take on the streets after the show. As in: aw honey, we're not really burning up actual evil - we're using art to galvanize resistance in the collective! (I'll return to this question about what's REALLY happening - what is REAL - at the end of this rant.) What I felt, padding silent across the pine needles in that haunted grove, hearing these atrocities named, wasn't metaphor. Real shit was happening, in the tears around me, in the father holding his daughter, in the blanched faces looking into the faces looking back from the images on the altars. We were actually reaching beyond the visible world, the rational world, the contemporary strictures of space/time as our culture imagines them, and into an experience of mystery, of not-knowing, of the invisible realms that lie around and beyond all that. And as I wandered, I came upon the tree (pictured above) marking the loss of longtime Bread & Puppet leader George Bartenieff. And this vortex opened. I knew as clearly as I know in my practice that our wounds go way back, and to heal them we must learn to straddle space and time, and dance in the bardo between. 

I'm going on too long. So I'm just going to touch briefly on 3 of the many elements rubbing together to catch fire in this moment in the grove:
1. We drove to Bread & Puppet straight from receiving a ton of ancestral history (German, like the Bartenieffs) from my uncle that very morning, much of which was gutting and much of which was gorgeous and some of which was both. He could barely get the stories out, so bad was his cough - we know he's not doing well, so visiting him in his nursing home while he's still lucid was much of the reason for this last-minute trip. The state-funded place was a nightmarish window into the deterioration of health care systems, and weeping at the bedside of my mother's only brother over ancestral stories of cruelty and mental illness and the beautiful depictions of a deep connection to land and place and the close-knit camaraderie of working in a brick yard... this was some kindling in the mix.
2. Bartenieff's guru-like image on the shrine, next to his everyday cap, and what that combo signaled in and for me. It's about the inseparability of politics and - let's shorthand call it 'spirituality' - that Bread & Puppet stands for. This combo, which was clear in GB's work, was challenged by a tendency in New York theater circles to contrast him with another big figure in the avant-garde movement of the 60's: Bartenieff's the activist, and anthropologist Richard Schechner was the guy interested in ritual. Richard wasn't just my theater teacher, director, and the first guy to teach me yoga, he was a crazy-close bosom buddy of mine for a few years, and we spent a ton of time together. Crude and oversimplified shorthand: to juxtapose them is to say that art has to be either political (Bartenieff) or ritualistic (Schechner). G.B. was absolutely devoted to ritual, and Richard was absolutely devoted to politics... point being: their contrast is unfounded and Bread & Puppet is the perfect instantiation of the magic that takes place when that  duality is transcended. 
3. George Bartenieff is son of Irmgard Bartenieff, whose movement fundamentals we have been practicing at Shiné since they have started to haunt me again, decades after I learned them in college dance classes with Mady Cantor at Bryn Mawr. It's that rolling-around-on-the-floor stuff we do, drawn out and elaborated by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, informed by the embryonic/birth/early childhood satisfaction cycle of yield, push, reach, grasp and hold. In the last year Irmgard's movements have been making their way through me not just  in what they've revealed at the cellular level, in my fascial holding patterns, but way beyond that. And I mean beyond beyond - not just my subtle body, but reaching back through time to wounds that predate me by generations, and forward to my daughters as I experience how the patterns of my people show up in them and - praise Jah - DO NOT. 

So the vortex that opened in that grove was about what is real. What belongs. What occasions change. What actions and undertakings are worthy of our time. What I'm here to share.
And I'm tired and it's 4pm and I want you to come on Labor Day so I need to send this off, and I'll just sing it out one more blippity blip time: the patterns we heal through our practices are about things we have learned from our people, and shifting their shape is the way we change culture. Our tendencies, with regard to how we experience surrender, or pushing back/against, or reaching for things, or grasp grasp grasping them or holding on aren't just about our private wounds. They are the wounds of our people. They express culture. And cultural repair takes place in spirals, swirls, pooling, cutting-through, wearing away, burning off, unpeeling unspooling unpacking unmaking that stretch beyond this space and time. Political change cannot take place in the brain alone, or in writing to our senators or showing up for the next action training or proclaiming All.The.Right.Things on Instagram. The change takes shape in and through every part of us. Cultural change takes place in us and through us and around and beyond us and we are navigating the mysterium. We need to feel our way along together, we need one another, we are lost and we are finding our way. Together. Inside the practice. This belief and approach is central to the work of ancestral healing I've been holding space for, not just in classes but in the Somatics for Psychedelics practice group, in the Repatterning Domination/Revising Mysticism workshops, and certainly certainly certainly in this September's Ancestral Healing retreat which will engage deeply with Bartenieff movement and Amaka's Saturday workshop on ancestral re-membering through connection and if you are still with me, you belong with us. Come with a friend - the last room is yours.
I can't proofread this and it's too long and nothing is perfect and off it goes.