New Tactics Meet New People

Photo: Philippe Duhamel

Janelle Treibitz is a proud puppetista, organizer and waitress who also likes to hone her training skills on the side. In this interview, she shares her passion for puppets, wholesome bread and liberation. 

Q. Please tell me, Janelle Treibitz, how did you come to puppets?

J. T.: I have always cared about social justice issues and people. I attribute some of it to judaism and the way I was raised as a Jew, to my synagogue and to my parents teaching me to question, and make opinions for myself. 

I found theatre by accident. My friend in high school wanted me to join a theatre club with her. She quickly dropped out, but I found that I liked it. 

While I really liked theatre, I couldn't make it mesh with the idea that I wanted to be doing social change work. I felt confused. So I got interested in politically oriented theatre, kept an eye on theatre of the oppressed. I went to theatre schoo,l in the directing track, but found this was not something I was really good at. 

Then I discovered organizing. I took a class on organizing. And I found — Oh my God! — that you can actually win stuff! So there are ways to strategically break things down, and having campaigns!? As an activist, I was thinking about ending the root causes, but had never figured out there were steps to get there. 

So I started doing all this anti-war work, mostly street theatre. And the culture of the movement against the war in Irak was like "No, No, No, we have to stop this. This is terrible. We don't want this! We don't want this!" And when we didn't get what we wanted, all the people I knew were just depleted and went keplunk! Everybody was burned out after all this energy.  

It is around that time that I went to see a Bread & Puppet show. It was incredible. I had spent all this time saying: we don't want this, we don't want this. And here was Bread & Puppet  who just laughed the hell out of the situation.  This guy greeted us in the lobby, all dressed up as a professor, teaching us the difference between the "Terrorists" and the "Horrorists". Terrorists are doing it for ideology. Horrorists are doing it for money, the business people and the politicians who make a go at it. It really got to the heart of it. And it was very funny.

At the end of the show, there's this giant puppet that comes in, on pulleys because it's so big. It lays down.  And breathes... Up. And down... And up. And down... 

I was in tears. I had spent so much energy in anger, hating, rage! And suddenly here I am, laughing, then crying.  That breathing puppet at the end, it just felt so life-affirming. And that's when I said: I want to learn how to do that. I want to know how to make people laugh about the issues. I want to be life affirming. Rage is important, even useful sometimes, but I don't want it to be the emotion that drives the work that I'm doing. So I went to Bread & Puppet, not with the intention of becoming a puppeteer, but just because I wanted to know how they did it. I got hooked. 

Q. Where does the term "puppetista" come from?

J.T.: Puppettistas are a newer generation of puppeteers. The term puppetista comes from Brasil and implies the use of puppetry with a political end in mind. The shows don't necessarily have to be political, but the puppet making itself is a political act. The way that you do it is in line with your values. Puppetistas typically use trash. In using trash, we avoid using up a lot of things, and avoid toxic materials. There is also a consciousness about using materials from the place where you are. Bread and Puppet, for instance, has borrowed a number of things from puppetistas. The use of inner tubes from bicycle tires in puppet making comes from puppetistas. There is a lot of give and take from older traditions of radical puppeteers.

Q. How far back does the tradition of using puppets for political awareness go?

The tradition of political puppets goes back a very long time. In the US, I have seen pictures of labour parades dating back from the 1900's with big floats that look like they were made of papier mâché, such as a figure of a boss. 

In the 1960's, Bread and Puppet revolutionized how actively puppets were used in the movement. They were already doing street theatre with puppets in Harlem when Grace Paly, a friend of Bread & Puppet who died recently, said to this group of friends, "hey, why don't you come and bring a bunch of your puppets to the next protest?" So they did. It was the first time puppets were used in this way in that movement. 

A street marching culture with large puppets to bring strong visualization to big social issues took off from there. But the tradition comes from a bunch of different cultures, other places too, including South and Central America, where parades happen at least once a year. Even in times when countries have been at their most repressive, these events are still allowed to happen. Even in very oppressed times, everybody comes together in a carnival-type parade where many people dress up as, say, politicians and people that are in positions of power, with the purpose of mocking them. 

You can really get away with a lot, throug puppetry. Bread & Puppet has gotten away with a lot. Very mainstream educational organizations, for instance, of to Bread & Puppet and send all their kids once a year to team up with this radically left organization. And the kids learn how to walk on stilts. They learn how to tell Conta Storias, which is an old form of story telling using pictures and a narrator. They learn some mask work and papier mâché. It is hysterical! 

It's this funny thing where we get to march in these incredibly conservative towns that are mostly pro-war — for the war in Irak — with these Iraki women, these masks of Iraki women holding dead corpses, to the mournful beat of a dong... on the July 4th parade! 

That's the kind of thing that we get away with. And it's like: "How does THAT happen?" Incredible.

I have a friend in Nigeria who does different kinds of plays, of theatre work. He says when there is incredible repression, the artists are the ones who are targeted last. They are able to produce theatre that talks about the issues for far longer than the people who write about them in newspapers or those who talk about them openly. They can do theatre on issues much longer than everybody else. 

Q. How can puppets and theatre get away with so much?

Perhaps because theatre and puppets are not taken seriously? Puppets seem kind of harmless. It's like: Puppets, oh yeah, yeah. In the case of the "patriotic" parades in conservative towns, the puppets and their anti-war props are invited because they are the life of the parade. 

It just doesn't seem challenging. People are used to look elsewhere. It's an alternative channel. It's not the channel that people look to first, or think makes a difference. 

Even activists don't take it seriously. Say you have a stage line-up for some big rally, with a mixture of speakers and musicians and people doing shows or something. Guess what happens when things start going over time? The first people to be cut will be the artists and musicians. This happens a lot. They will cut the artists and put more speakers on. What a mistake! And that's saying nothing about how much more time the artists put in preparing their contribution than most speakers did. 

So artists aren't respected even in our movements. Even our own people don't take us seriously. It's like, oh yeah, this is just the fluff on the cake. People don't say that, but it's the attitude. 

Q. So how can we use the power of art and theatre better?

Even me, when I'm in the midst of organizing, my last thought will be on how to bring in art. At first, I'm like, okay we've got the strategy, we've got the goal. We have not integrated the notion that culture is important in our movements. And not only important, essential. And I feel that's the difference. Culture is a need and it is essential. It's the only way that we can move forward. 

I have been doing a lot of thinking about how culture is a tool of repression, a really active and perhaps the most effective form of repression out there. Because everyone internalizes it in such incredible ways, from the media, how things are portrayed in movies... It communicates values. It communicates so much that we take in. 

I'm still dealing with what I think about love, based on growing up with these romantic comedies, you know? Things that are so into me: beauty ads, models... all of these are communicating things to us and it's how we see our world and how we communicate our world.

So if culture is a tool of oppression, you can't ignore it. You need to create your own culture as a tool of liberation to counter it. And if you don't have a culture to counter it, you won't be successful at all. 

You can't just base this work on intellectualizing it. You can't. You have to bring in other channels, because impression doesn't live in your head. It lives all over you. It lives in the heart. It lives in the body. And we only treat it as if it lived in the head.  

So I see this split. There's people doing organizing. And then there's people doing things like puppetery, but it is not connected enough with actual organizing campaigns. If you only have politics, it's not going to do it. If you only have art, it's not going to do it. There are entire subcultures — like the anarchist, punk subcultures — that have powerful people who really change other people. But if it's not followed by strategic thinking, and organizing, then that's not going to win either. To win, we really need to be a combination of all these things. 

Philippe Duhamel, interTactica.org 

Disclosure: I have long been a fan of Bread and Puppets, especially now that my 19-year old son Colin joined as an apprentice last summer. Want to check out their work? See this little movie I made. My son is in it. And Janelle is in it, doing Georgian singing among other things.

Join Janelle Treibitz and these other phenomenal theatre people as we discuss all week using the power of theatre to help advance human rights and social struggles.