Puppet Uprising: The Art of Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater

This series was first broadcast in December of 2002.  I would like to dedicate its appearance here to the memory of my friend Taylor Stoehr, who patiently urged it into existence. Taylor and I got to know each other when he took an interest in my book Ivan Illich in Conversation.  (Illich had been a good friend of Paul Goodman, and Taylor was Goodman's literary executor, as well as the author, by then, of several books and long articles on Goodman's life and work.) As our acquaintance grew into friendship, and Taylor got to know the work I had done at CBC Radio, he began to insist that Peter Schumann, the founder, director and inspiration of the Bread and Puppet Theater belonged in what he generously called my "pantheon."  I resisted, repeatedly, on the grounds that Peter Schumann was, and is a great visual artist whose work would be quite impossible to represent on radio.  Taylor did not relent, and so I eventually agreed to call on Peter at his and the theatre's home in Glover, Vermont.  Peter didn't initially seem that interested in the idea of a radio series, but he did remark at that meeting that he had always been dissatisfied with video representations of his pageants, circuses and puppet plays.  That made me understand, on reflection, that Taylor might be right after all, and that radio, whose subjects appear only in the imagination, might be a very suitable medium to convey something of what Schumann and his many collaborators have accomplished.  Eventually Peter and I sat down for a long interview in the CBC's New York studios, everyone else concerned proved friendly and cooperative - except for the late Stefan Brecht, the author of a marvelous two volume study of Bread and Puppet who curtly rejected my advances - and the series was made.  For me it resulted in friendships, and an attachment to Bread and Puppet that continue to this day.  I hope new listeners will agree that the series still justifies Taylor's marvelous confidence that it could and should be made...

Doctoring the Family

This series was a collaboration with my wife Jutta Mason.  First broadcast early in 1985, nearly thirty years ago, it was based on her work in archives across the country on the history of childbirth and childrearing in Canada, looking first at what life was like before the establishment of the modern medical system, and then at how this system established its hegemony in the first half of the 20th century.   A couple of years later Jutta would draw on this work to write the historical section of the Report on the Implementation of Midwifery in Ontario (1987) which led to the legalization of midwifery in this province.   I'm rebroadcasting it here now so it will be available to young friends in their childbearing years who are wondering how things got the way they are...

The Corruption of Christianity: Ivan Illich on Gospel, Church and Society

corruption.jpg

This series was broadcast in 2,000 twelve years after my first interviews with Ivan Illich were presented on Ideas.  We had become friends in the meanwhile, and I had spent as much time with him as his peripatetic style and my more settled life in Toronto allowed.   During that time we again and again discussed a theme I had barely been aware of when I recorded the first series: Illich's idea that the Western civilization that grew out of Latin Christendom could only be fully grasped when understood as the corruption, or perversion of the New Testament.  When itbecame clear that he would never be able, in the the time remaining to him, to write a book on this theme, I offered to try and elicit his ideas in a series of interviews.  These took place over a period of several weeks in 1996 and 1998 and were then broadcast on Ideas.  Four years later, and two years after Illich's death in 2002, a complete transcription of these interviews was published, with a preface by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, under the title The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich.   Here are the radio programmes...