Courtesy of Jessie Lind PUPPETS LIKE THIS will be used by the Bread and Puppet Theater.

Don’t let the name Bread and Puppet Theater fool you. This is not a children’s play or a religious pageant — except in so far as religion is theater, and theater is religion in the minds of those who have experienced Bread and Puppet’s performances. The Bread and Puppet Theater will present “The Insurrection Mass and Funeral March for a Rotten Idea” tonight at 8 p.m. at the State Theater.

Theater member Susan Hirschmugl said the Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann, “a German dancer, bread-maker, and sculptor,” and it is one of the oldest self-supporting, non-profit theater companies in the United States. Schumann uses masks and puppets — huge paper maché creations with crude but striking aspects — to communicate social, political and environmental messages.

“Puppets were the traditional theater of the streets,” Hirschmugl said. “They could say things an actor or actress couldn’t say.”

Bread and Puppet staged peace marches on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the Vietnam War, toured Europe, spent four years as the theater in residence at Goddard College and eventually settled in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. There the company turned an old barn into a puppet museum and for many years held circuses and other spectacles on the grounds.

Gene Endres, an engineer in the telecommunications facilities at Ithaca College, attended some of the circuses in Vermont. There he not only saw spectacles and sideshows, but he listened to poetry and browsed “Cheap Art,” the woodcuts, printing and hand-paintings produced by some of the theater members and friends.

“It was kind of an arts training camp,” Endres said. “But arts in the service of political expression.”

The theater members also ate a lot of bread. The bread itself is a symbol, like most of the props in Bread and Puppet’s pageants.

“Bread feeds people, and art should do the same,” Hirschmugl said. “And you need to digest it to get something out of it.”

“One of the great things about puppetry is that it gives you a lot of pictures, a lot of images,” Hirschmugl said. “And you can decide for yourself what the pictures mean to you — and your meaning might be different from the person sitting next to you.”

Bread and Puppet often uses volunteers in its performance. In Ithaca, 30 community members will join the company for two rehearsals and the Insurrection mass. Part of the concept behind the masses has to do with audience participation, as well.

“The format has an open structure,” Hirschmugl said. “People can follow along on their own. It’s sort of informal, and people are familiar with it … It borrows from the tradition of Catholic Mass, but what it says in each step is very different.”

The Insurrection mass has 10 movements, including an opening prayer, hymn of the day, secular scripture reading and reception of the Rotten Idea from Hell. The Idea could be any current issue the performers think is a travesty.

“The rotten idea may come from yesterday’s paper,” said Jessie Lind, a member of Ithaca Community Radio. “It is very likely to be improvised when they come into rehearsal.”

She said the volunteers’ ideas and talents would be incorporated into the performance as well. The result is unpredictable but often inspiring to the audience.

“It has a sense that there are many ways to live on this planet, and let’s celebrate those ways, and why do so many people do things that are damaging to our souls,” Lind said. “The politics is sort of a deeper politics than ‘let’s parody George Bush’ … It’s more than just who’s president.”