SPLEEN

In the organizer's words:

Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel [Leipzig]

Charles Baudelaire: Poems in prose

This production is based on Charles Baudelaire's late work, his poems in prose "The Spleen of Paris". Dense miniatures, scenes often compressed into a few lines or seemingly fleeting trains of thought evoke the era of the "setting of the romantic sun". They reflect fragments of failed utopias in the face of political restoration in the previous century: an astonishingly contemporary panopticon.

The sometimes darkly bestial, sometimes cheerfully melancholy atmosphere of Baudelaire's cosmos plays with people on the threshold of modernity: between apathetic greed for life and eroticized longing for death, between yearning for infinity and brutal irrelevance, mostly succinct in the tragic, always subtle in the comic.

The open style of play in this production - that of the players with figures and musical instruments on stage, as well as with the text material, spoken by children and young people - aims at a kaleidoscopic view of the audience. A magic of its own is created in the imagination between actors, material and audience, a sequence of images that counterpoints Baudelaire's gaze and seeks to open it up to a contemporary perception.

In co-production with the FITZ! Center for Puppet Theatre Stuttgart and Westflügel Leipzig

• Play & set: Michael Vogel
• Live music: Charlotte Wilde
• Voices: Jördis Barth, Julka Finger, Luana Goller, Lotta Hillert, Merlin Lando Dweezil, Ben Müller, Luis Neuschäfer, Vincent Sudau
• Production manager: Patrick Kukwa
• Director: Hendrik Mannes