The Flowers of Evil

This title alone! A panorama on the abyss.
While entire districts in Paris are being destroyed to make room for the wide boulevards, while glass arcades replace the medieval alleys and gas lanterns blur the border between day and night, Charles Baudelaire begins a revolution of literature. The fusion of the seemingly incompatible – themes of the abysmal, the extreme and the ennui captured and verbally condensed in the classic form of Romantic love poetry – this was precisely the first step on the road to modernism. And no sooner had Baudelaire’s first work appeared in 1857 than a criminal trial followed with charges of amorality and blasphemy. Some poems were censored, all printed copies confiscated.

Baudelaire’s radical subjectivity and incessant search for the moment, as well as the assumption of beauty precisely where no one suspects it, allow a transfer into puppetry. The texts are permeated by the phenomenon of synaesthesia, an interweaving of sensory perceptions. The production follows this line in the collaboration of figure, voice and music and allows the iridescent beauty of the abysmal to shine through. Every encounter with The Flowers of Evil resembles entering a labyrinth. The familiar makes a new and irritating appearance. It is at times “terrifying and grandiose for everyone” (Marcel Proust).

For these Flowers of Evil, a number of individual recordings were made by different speakers in French, German and English. The production continues the first joint exploration of Baudelaire’s work – Spleen (2006) – by Wilde & Vogel with director Hendrik Mannes.