THE BREAD & PUPPET THEATER returned to Philadelphia as The Lubberland National Dance Company in “27 Dirt-Cheap Dances,” a topical play for our trying times of economic crisis. Bread & Puppet’s Lubberlanders (including a dozen Philadelphia-area volunteers) enacted problem-solving dances for our problems, collateral damage dances for victims, victory dances for victories, , funeral dances in response to the most recent wars of Lubberland, and potato dances with no apparent relevance whatsoever. Karl Marx made a cameo appearance from high atop his trusty ladder, and yeah, there were some puppets, the notorious Cheap Art Store, and Peter Schumann's famed sourdough bread made from a 160-year-old Silesian starter culture and baked in a wood-fired brick oven in Vermont. Schumann conceived the entire show, wrote the text, created the choreography, and handed it to Bread & Puppet company member Maura Gahn for its debut East Coast tour, making a stop in West Philly and also in Kensington with a special solo violin performance by Katt Hernandez.

In the 1950s Peter Schumann, Bread & Puppet’s founder, moved from Germany to New York to work with Merce Cunningham’s modern dance troupe. Schumann was both a choreographer and a sculptor with an interest in reviving the avant-garde and folkloric arts that had been diminished in the Second World War. The merging of these forms laid the foundations for the Bread & Puppet Theater, whose puppets can be considered “choreographed sculpture" steeped in a tradition of experimental rusticism. After over 40 years of being known for his puppetry, Schumann has returned to his roots by forming The Lubberland Dance Company with a mixed group of dancers and non-dancers. Based on the idea that our bodies need to break out of their usual routines and that anyone can dance, this tour has brought more people to see—and to perform as—Lubberland Dancers in cities and towns around North America.