The Bread & Puppet Theater Museum celebrates its thirtieth birthday in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom with an Open House featuring events that the Bread and Puppet Theater is famous for. Throughout the afternoon there will be fresh sourdough rye bread from an outdoor clay oven, music by the renown country fiddler Burt Porter and friends and Sacred Harp songs by the Northeast Kingdom Shape Note Singers. Resident puppeteers will give puppet shows and Tom Azarian from Burlington will again present his inimitable Crankies (picture shows on a scroll, with music). All these events, which also include two world premieres, Bread & Puppet's "Paradise-Mart Exorcism" and the first performance by the Lubberland National Dance Co., will take place in and around the Museum, a remodeled old dairy barn.

The Museum charges no admission but does welcome donations and purchases in its store, well-stocked with Bread & Puppet's distinctive posters, publications, cards and videos. On two full floors of the 100-foot-long building, the many hundreds of puppets and masks, ranging from tiny cardboard cutouts to towering figures and huge, disembodied heads, stand and hang in their places, ready to amaze new visitors and welcome back old friends.

Each weekend during July and August, there will also be an 8 pm Friday show and an afternoon outdoor Sunday program.

The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 on New York City's Lower Eastside by 70-year old Silesian-born sculptor and choreographer, Peter Schumann. In 1969 a nine-month tour of Europe won recognition and critical acclaim for Bread and Puppet. In 1970, the Theater moved to Vermont as theater-in-residence at Goddard College, letting itself be influenced by living in the countryside. Four years later the Theater moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, where a 100-year-old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets. Bread and Puppet Theater does massive spectacles in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. Their pageants have a broad theme-oriented appeal to large non-elite audiences. They address social, political and environmental issues or simply the common urgencies of our lives. Some of the awards received by Peter Schumann and Bread and Puppet are the Obie Award, the Erasmus Award from Amsterdam, the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, UNIMA-USA's Citation of Excellence and the Puppeteers of America President's Award. Bread and Puppet is one of the oldest non-profit, self-supporting theater companies in the United States. For more information on the Bread and Puppet Theater: www.breadandpuppet.org/