Elka Schumann In Memoriam

Elka Leigh Scott Schumann was born on August 29, 1935 in Magnitogorsk, USSR. Her father, John Scott, was a young radical who had quit college—in defiance of his also radical parents—to help create the new Soviet society with his hands. In the steel mill town of Magnitogorsk, he met Maria Dikareva Ivanovna , known as Masha, who was working as a secretary and attending school and who had also come to the Ural mountains to help build socialism. The couple married and had two children, Elka and two years later Elena.

In the mounting tensions of World War II suspicion of foreigners was growing in Soviet Russia and John was fired from his job as steelworker and foreman, along with many others in the international workforce. With growing disillusionment about Stalin’s Russia John began working as a journalist and the family moved to Moscow. In short order John was expelled for writing dispatches critical of Stalin, and the family left the Soviet Union via Vladivostok by ship, with the launch of the Nazi invasion starting only two hours after they had left the harbor. Changing ships in Tokyo and Honolulu, the Scott family made their way to the United States where they briefly stayed with John’s brother Bob on his farm in Pennsylvania before settling into an apartment on Waverly Place near Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, New York City.

With John in Europe as a war correspondent, Masha set about raising her two daughters, learning English and getting to know the social milieu of John’s journalist colleagues, including the author Pearl S. Buck, who encouraged Masha to give public talks expounding on the benefits of the Soviet revolution. Elka and Elena attended the City and Country School, a progressive elementary school where the entire student body was immersed each year in a different period of world history.

After the war, John was appointed to head Time, Inc.’s Central European Bureau, and the family relocated to Berlin for a three-year stay with all of the trappings of the victors of war amidst the ruins of the destroyed city. When John’s assignment ended in 1948, Berlin was under blockade and the family left with all of their belongings–including their jeep–transported in a B-17 bomber, while they returned to the U.S. on the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner.

John had purchased some land in Ridgefield, Connecticut, about an hour outside of New York City, where the family homesteaded in a small cottage while John, with Masha’s help, built their family’s dream home over the next three years. The girls attended Ridgefield High School, where they had a busy life —Elka was immersed in art from an early age, pursuing visual art, music and dance across her school years—and family activities, including ongoing Russian lessons with their mother to maintain their native language. Russian was spoken in the household, and the girls retained the German they had learned while living in Berlin. In 1952/53, the daughters transferred to boarding schools, with Elka attending the Putney School in Vermont for her final year of high school. After graduation, Elka joined her father on assignment for Time, Inc., spending the summer crisscrossing Western Europe before enrolling in Bryn Mawr College.

Influenced by her grandfather Scott Nearing—the American radical and homesteading guru—Elka did social work in Harlem and other low-income neighborhoods during the weekends and for at least one summer while she studied at Bryn Mawr. By now, her father John’s politics had steadily moved to the right, and Elka had found inspiration and guidance in Scott’s critique of capitalist society and his principled and utilitarian approach to a life outside of and in resistance to capitalist exploitation. (While she was still in high school, Scott had taken her on a trip to the slaughterhouses of Chicago, which led her to join her grandfather as a vegetarian for a number of years.)

In 1955 Elka decided to do her junior year at Bryn Mawr abroad, in Germany. In Munich she was introduced to Peter Schumann, bedridden in the hospital from a life-threatening head injury suffered in a bicycle accident, as part of a recruitment effort for Peter’s experimental dance group. The meeting made a deep impression on Elka, who later wrote, “We didn’t have any big conversation; he was still recovering. I just knew I had to see him again and again. It was mysterious and very strong.” Elka began participating in Peter and his friends’ artistic ventures—a combination of experimental choreography, music and visual art, staged ad hoc in whatever spaces would take them. Enamored with Peter and his bohemian existence, Elka extended her stay in Europe as a year off from college. She spent time with Peter and his troupe, hitchhiked around Germany with her lute and woodcuts, and visited her Russian family in the Soviet Union.

Elka came back to the States to finish her studies at Bryn Mawr, graduating with a degree in Art History in 1958. She then returned to Germany where she met back up with Peter, living in various opportunistic housing situations across Germany, as well as stays in France, Austria, and Sweden. They supported themselves with various odd jobs, including working in vineyards in the Provence region of France, and hawking Peter’s woodcuts. Elka was a visual artist as well, with woodcuts and watercolors her favorite media, and maintained her practice during these early years in Europe. In 1959, Elka gave birth to Tamar in Austria, and a year later in 1960 Ephraim (now Salih) was born in Germany.

Partly inspired by the American experimental dance and music scene through a John Cage and Merce Cunningham performance Peter had seen, the couple decided to travel to America to visit Elka’s parents and give Peter a taste of the “new world.” After a short stay in Ridgefield, and funded by the sale of artworks from a local gallery exhibition that Elka’s parents had lined up for Peter, the family moved to New York. On a visit to the Lower East Side where he had heard that the rents were cheap, Peter met Richard (“Dicky”) Tyler, who lined him up with an apartment on East 4th St between Avenues C&D formerly occupied by the artist Claes Oldenburg. Elka became fast friends with Dicky’s wife Dorothea, which segued into members of the Tyler’s commune/cult, the Uranian Phalanstery, becoming Peter’s first performing group when he staged his premier piece in the U.S., Totentanz, at Judson Church in 1962. The connection to Oldenburg and the community around Judson Church introduced Peter to the Happenings performance art scene, which was burgeoning in the neighborhood at that time and would have a deep influence on Peter’s artistic vision.

In 1962 Elka gave birth to Solveig in New York City and began work that summer on her Master’s degree in Russian Language at Windham College in Vermont, leading the family to move briefly to Putney. Elka was hired to teach Russian for the ‘62-’63 school year at the Putney School, replacing her former teacher, who was on sabbatical. After his application at Putney for a job as dance teacher was rejected, Peter began working on puppet show projects in an after-school program with Putney students. While Elka continued her studies at Windham the following summer, the three children were cared for by their grandparents in Ridgefield, and Peter hitched a trailer filled with puppets and props to the family jeep and began an impromptu tour of New England towns.

The family returned to New York where with the help of family friend Bob Nichols Peter had procured a loft on Delancey Street (previously rented by the artist Red Grooms) to move his work in puppetry. It was around this time, the name Bread and Puppet Theater was first adopted. The loft was used as a museum, puppet-making workshop, and performance venue. Elka began her long involvement with children’s theater here, by staging hand puppet shows for neighborhood kids on weekend afternoons, with her friend Eva Eckardt. In 1964 Max was born, and the family moved once again, this time to a three-room railroad apartment on East 6th St.—with a bathtub in the kitchen, and a common closet toilet in the hallway. During these early New York days, with Elka tending to her growing family of babies and young children, Peter supplemented his theater work with odd jobs like apartment painting and selling masks made from plaster cast molds. Elka got to know other young mothers in the neighborhood’s Tompkins Square and East River parks, and a circle of family friends, including Deedee Halleck and Peggy Leo, started to grow. Mabel and George Dennison, who had founded the experimental First Street School in the neighborhood, became fast family friends, as did Helen and Jules Rabin, who also participated in the growing Bread and Puppet community.

Elka’s principles and politics were greatly influenced by her grandfather Scott, who while known primarily for inspiring the back-to-the-land movement in the 60s and 70s, had started his career as a notable socialist economist and teacher. His own life-as-activist ethos inspired Elka throughout her life, which in turn inspired Peter and found realization in Bread and Puppet’s prominent participation in the anti-Vietnam War movement as well as a myriad of other protest movements for social, economic, and environmental justice. Elka found a calling in the early Women’s Liberation movement and had a strong, if somewhat old-fashioned, feminist perspective.

In 1966 Elka obtained a visa for Russia, and took all four children for a family visit to the village of her mother’s birth, Udomlya. They stayed long enough for Tamar to attend several months of first grade. In 1967, back in New York, Elka’s fifth child Tjasa Maria was born. By the late 60s, Bread and Puppet had received international acclaim as part of the new American experimental theater scene and was being invited to festivals in Europe. In 1969, the Theater embarked on an epic eight- month tour across western and central Europe and Elka came along with all five children, ages two to ten years old. During the tour Elka and the children peeled off for several weeks to visit the Russian family in Udomlya.

For over 100 years the Lower East Side had been a low-income working class neighborhood with a rich mix of immigrant communities, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, and increasingly after World War Two from Puerto Rico. The neighborhood—which had a deep history of radical politics and innovation in the arts—began to decline in the 1960s, and with the growth of the drug trade, crime had also risen. The Schumann family and the members of the B&P community were commonly burglarized and mugged; even some of the kids were regularly held up on the way to school for lunch money. Around 1968, returning from the bank with the B&P payroll, Elka was held up at gunpoint with two of the children in tow. With increasing concern about the safety and health of the kids growing up in the declining urban neighborhood, coupled with an invitation initiated by Jules Rabin for Peter to take on an artist’s residency at the experimental Goddard College, the Schumann family and Bread and Puppet relocated to Vermont in 1970.

The family and Theater moved to Cate Farm, adjacent to the Goddard campuses. As Peter reassembled the B&P working group, culled from New York City participants and new recruits from Goddard, Elka set about settling the family as best she could in different settings on the farm amidst the B&P chaos. She established a vegetable garden, continued her participation in the theater, which increasingly took on administrative and bookkeeping tasks, and established a children’s theater on the side—the Dancing Bear Theater— which would perform at local schools. Around 1970-71 Elka and Peter met Larry Gordon, a young SDS activist and musician who introduced them to Shape Note (Sacred Harp) a cappella chorus music. Sacred Harp would become a musical mainstay of Bread and Puppet performances, which played a significant part in the revival of this American choral folk tradition with early-19th-century origins in the Northeast. Elka’s concurrent interest in Balkan singing would also find a prominent place in B&P’s musical repertoire.

In 1975, the Schumann family, with a much diminished Bread and Puppet group in tow, moved to the Dopp family farm in Glover, a town in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Peter had just disbanded the theater following the first large-scale iteration of the Domestic Resurrection and Circus—an emergent B&P theatrical form—at Cate Farm, and Elka’s parents had agreed to allow the family and theater to resettle on their property in Glover, which they had acquired as a potential retirement home in 1970.

In Glover the 110-year-old dairy barn was cleaned out and refashioned as the B&P museum—which Elka would take on the lead role in maintaining and running—and the Theater resumed the Circus and Pageant as an annual summer event which would grow to epic proportions. With the kids readjusting to the new local schools, Elka established a new garden, and reconfigured the Dancing Bear Theater from a new set of neighbors, including her new close friend Kari McGowan, a mother of four who lived in the area. Other meaningful friendships that Elka developed in the area which fell outside of the core Bread and Puppet community included the new Glover neighbors, Burt and Janet Porter, artist and bookmaker Clare Van Vliet, and Glover resident and homemaker Blanche Benway, among many others.

The Dopp farm was a replete agricultural unit with hay meadows, a pine tree plantation, a cedar forest, an apple orchard and maple sugar bush. With her background in agriculture from her grandfather and uncle, Elka took great interest in the property’s resources. She rented hayfields to local farmers, managed the woodlots with local foresters, harvested the apples from the orchard and produced cider, and revived the sugar bush as a family industry for several years, which peaked at over 2,000 taps. Elka’s main agricultural project after moving to Glover was a smattering of livestock, including chickens, pigs, geese, and turkeys, with her main focus on sheep. Elka, with the help of the kids, maintained a flock of around 20 sheep for about ten years, harvesting the wool—much of which she would card and spin with her daughters—and meat. Elka also took a deep interest in the history of the farm and befriended Daisy Dopp, visiting her regularly. Dopp had written short essays and dispatches on the old ways of farm life for local newspapers, which Elka collected into an anthology published by the Orleans Historical Society in 1983.

In 1976, Bread and Puppet did a sweeping three-month tour of Western and Central Europe and North Africa, with the full Schumann, Dennison, and Rabin families joining along, this time with all the kids—aged two to 16—performing. In 1979 the family toured Europe again, this time comprising the core group, with most of the kids taking on full puppeteer responsibilities. The show Washerwoman Cantata—a tribute to writer, activist, and family friend Grace Paley—was chosen and shaped by Elka for this largely family project. By the early 80s Bread and Puppet’s popularity in the European theater festival circuit had started to wane, and touring began shifting to participatory workshop formats as well as to “developing” countries, notably in Latin America.

As touring income diminished, the summer circus and pageant became the central part of Bread and Puppet’s programming calendar, with work beginning in the early summer, and cascades of puppeteers and workers joining in the effort throughout the summer, culminating in the final two-day free public performance. Audiences grew from the hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands, with the number of people working on the circus mushrooming as well. The Schumann family was enmeshed in the whirlwind of Bread and Puppet activities to the point of kitchen utensils being used for props. For her own and the family’s sanity, Elka needed more clear separation and had a family house built—to her own design—a couple of hundred yards uphill from the farm, on the way to the sugarbush.

The posters and publications which Peter was constantly producing began to play a bigger role in the financial sustainability of the theater. Elka began a mail-order enterprise, offering items in modest flyers she would write and design in cut-and-paste style. Elka instituted the name Bread and Puppet Press in 1984, and began implementing and overseeing the full scope of printing and publication related activities, including the introduction of the ever-popular B&P calendars in 1988, the mass production of hand-painted posters, learning and developing the use of a letterpress, and setting up a press store in the museum.

Elka had not visited the Soviet Union in over ten years, but in 1987, with the beginnings of Glasnost underway, Elka and Peter were invited by the Gorbachev administration to attend a cultural world peace conference in Moscow—where to Elka’s delight she met the Hollywood idol of her youth, Gregory Peck(!). This trip was followed by [several more?] Bread and Puppet tours in the late eighties and early 90s—just preceding the Soviet Union’s collapse—which also allowed Elka to visit with long-missed Russian family members. Elka continued to visit family members in the newly established Russian Federation through the 90s and into the 2000s.

With all the children having left home by the mid-nineteen-eighties, over the next several decades Elka’s life was a full jumble of overlapping projects. She juggled Bread and Puppet work with her agricultural and land-management projects, and her musical interests, including organizing and participating in Sacred Harp sings and taking up the saxophone, which she played in the Circus band. Elka also made frequent visits to her aging mother in Connecticut, whom she helped care for with her sister. Starting in the mid-90s, grandchildren started being born: Anselm in 1994, Olive and Orlando in 1999, Axel in 2002, and Ira in 2008. Elka and Peter provided helpful childcare for all of them, which gave them great joy.

Elka’s role in Bread and Puppet cannot be overstated—she was the glue that held the whole enterprise together behind the scenes of Peter’s manic creative energy. She took on multitudinal roles and tasks across the history of the theater and its span of operations, including keeping track of the financial records and bank accounts, booking shows, managing publicity, operating all aspects of the B&P Press, overseeing the museum (including her celebrated museum tours), organizing and working in the B&P garden, overseeing the lease and land that Bread & Puppet used, participating in performances, usually in the musical aspects, and hosting the constant flow of visitors and guests, among many other capacities. Managing correspondences alone was a monumental task, and Elka’s office in the family house overflowed onto and over the kitchen table. Clearing the stacks of mail, receipts, clippings and other items of interest—all to be sorted at some future date—to make room for meals and guests was a regular ritual, which more often than not was later followed with searches for misplaced materials. The clacking of Elka’s beloved antique Royal typewriters, as well as the whir and clatter of Elka’s electric and mechanical adding machines were a constant auditory experience of the Schumann household.

Elka also was the creator and steward of the Bread and Puppet archive, collecting and saving press clippings and financial, administrative, and programming documents and ephemera from the very beginning of the theater. During the last decades of her life, the organization of the archive became a primary project of Elka’s. With the help of volunteers from the theater and the community, including trained archivists, the epic work of organizing, categorizing, and cataloging the huge amount of material, which never stopped accumulating, was overseen by Elka. Elka was also an avid amateur photographer, which culminated in scores of boxes of snapshots of performances, rehearsals and other projects on the B&P farm.

Unbeknownst to many, even those at the center of the B&P community, was the extent of Elka’s impact on the theater far beyond her organizational and participatory role. Elka was a driving force in her influence on and contributions to Peter’s creative process, and thus at the core of both the artistic direction as well as the actual shape and content of the Bread and Puppet productions. From selecting the music which would accompany shows, molding the final form of the classic street theater piece Hallelujah, coming up with the concept of Chico Mendez as a collaboration with neighbor and poet Burt Porter, conceiving the Washerwoman Cantata as a tribute to Grace Paley, developing the the form of the Passion Plays (as well as bringing the Africa family in to participate), and helping shape the form of B&P’s participation in the massive June 12th Rally for Nuclear Disarmament, Bread and Puppet’s largest-ever street theater/demonstration piece, are only a handful of examples of Elka’s essential contributions to the theater’s artistic legacy.

In her last decades, Elka’s life was in a constant state of project organization. As a night owl, her work on correspondence and archives would regularly go into the early morning hours. While being burdened by the never-ending chore of letter writing, Elka found great joy in it all the while, and along with all of her B&P work, maintained letter correspondences with her children, extended family, and old friends going back to her childhood, writing personal notes to mail-order press customers whom she didn’t even know, as well as taking up a number of pen-pal correspondences with prisoners.

Another key aspect of Elka’s participation in the theater was her role as observer and critic. She attended almost all the B&P performances she could, often travelling regionally to do so, and kept notes to discuss with Peter. In addition to her keen artistic sensibility, Elka was strongly principled and her sense of ethics played into her impressions and interpretations of the performances.

Elka began to suffer from mobility problems due to onsetting arthritis, which knee and hip surgery helped alleviate for some time before they encroached again. This didn’t stop her from an active life, which included a visit to relatives in Russia with her daughter Maria and grandson Ira in 2013. Elka suffered a stroke in 2018, which had a serious impact on her health and mobility, but she worked hard at therapies and exercises and was able to take up daily walks with Peter and the aid of a walker down the driveway. A second stroke in the fall of 2020 had further impact, confining Elka mostly to a wheelchair, but again in her very determined style, she was able to get to a point where she could continue her daily walks.

A third stroke took Elka away on August 1, 2021. She died at North Country Hospital with her five children and husband at her side. She had performed the workers’ anthem The Internationale on recorder during the circus the day before.

-Max Schumann

Additional Obituaries and Tributes

Democracy Now, August 2, 2021

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/8/2/headlines/bread_and_puppet_co_founder_elka_schumann_85_dies

Havana Times, August 2, 2021

https://havanatimes.org/news/bread-and-puppet-co-founder-elka-schumann-85-dies/

VT Digger, August 2, 2021

https://www.google.com/amp/s/vtdigger.org/2021/08/02/bread-and-puppet-theaters-elka-schumann-dies-at-85/amp/

Seven Days VT, August 2, 2021

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sevendaysvt.com/LiveCulture/archives/2021/08/02/elka-schumann-the-heart-and-soul-of-bread-and-puppet-dies%3fmedia=AMP%2bHTML

Newport Dispatch, August 3, 2021

https://newportdispatch.com/2021/08/03/co-founder-of-bread-and-puppet-elka-schumann-dies-at-85/

Rutland Herald, August 3, 2021

https://www.rutlandherald.com/opinion/editorials/elka/article_4e27a2ab-34e3-584e-959a-377401642ac1.html

Wonderland, August 3, 2021

https://gregcookland.com/wonderland/2021/08/03/elka-schumann/

Barton Chronicle, August, 2021

https://bartonchronicle.com/elka-schumann-memories-of-a-friend/

Counterpunch, August 6, 2021

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/06/elka-schumann-memories-of-a-friend/

New York Times, August 11, 2021

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/theater/elka-schumann-dead.amp.html

World Newz Info, August 11, 2021

https://worldnewzinfo.com/entertainment/elka-schumann-matriarch-of-the-bread-and-puppet-theater-dies-at-85/

Boston Globe, August 12, 2021

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bostonglobe.com/2021/08/12/metro/elka-schumann-cofounder-mainstay-bread-puppet-theater-dies-85/%3foutputType=amp

Good Word News, August 12, 2021

https://goodwordnews.com/bread-and-puppet-theater-matriarch-elka-schumann-dies-at-85/

Times Argus, August 14, 2021

https://www.timesargus.com/opinion/perspective/rabin-plain-and-glorious/article_b5d73991-4504-5c0d-8517-247bad508a37.html

UNIMA-Hungary, Tribute by Trudi Cohen, August 19, 2021

Seven Days, September 8, 2021

https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/elka-schumann-loved-motion-and-action-and-enterprise/Content?oid=33773527

NY Review of Books, September 23, 2021

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/09/23/bread-and-puppet-larger-than-life/