Not everyone in Hartford spent every minute of this past weekend waist-deep in buffalo wings and watching those $4 million commercial spots.

Two radical cultural events got people out of their houses. 

Papel Machete, a puppetry troupe from Puerto Rico, explored historical and contemporary issues on Saturday night at The Studio at Billings Forge. The mix of poetry, small and giant puppets,  music, and a shadow-projection piece was in Spanish sometimes, English the rest.

This began with “Performance radical de Frederick Douglass en la Via del Obama Express,” created in 2009. The piece imagines  a conversation between Frederick Douglass with someone from today who is so on board with Obama that he believes, initially, that the president symbolizes the end of racism. Douglass, predictably, disagrees.

This piece using table puppets sets the scene for the entrance of Uncle Sam, who chants “genocide.” The actor then removes the mask, wig, bow tie, and hat while explaining the next pieces, which are based on the case of Cornelius Rhoads. Rhoads, an American with the help of financing by the Rockefeller Foundation, was doing clinical research in Puerto Rico related to pernicious anemia. In 1931 he penned a letter claiming he had killed eight Puerto Ricans and transplanted cancer into others. When confronted, Rhoads claimed the letter was a “fantastic and playful composition,” a joke.

Later in the evening, the troupe performed “We’ll Fight with You!,” a piece dealing with foreclosure and displacement.

There were no empty seats. Admission was a suggested $10, but people were encouraged to just enter even if they could not pay. This policy encourages an audience to include residents of the neighborhood in which the venue is located.

On Sunday afternoon in Asylum Hill, people showed up to hear Yvonne Moore and Mat Callahan perform pieces from Songs of Freedom: The James Connolly Songbook. Nearly each piece was put in context. The duo explained how the lyrics were set to music when the tune was not provided, or when the tune needed to be reconfigured, such as that which had been set to the tune of “O Tannenbaum.”

Callahan shared Connolly’s statement: “Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few and not the faith of the multitude.”

When the audience was asked to sing along, it did. No awkward silences in the Carriage House Theater.

 Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore will be playing in Rochester, Buffalo, and Troy, NY, along with Somerville and Boston, MA in the upcoming weeks.