Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel: Spleen

Between “Ennui and Reverie”:
Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel’s Reimagining of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen

An Essay by Marissa Fenley

Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel’s Spleen is a series of poetic re-figurations. Much like the  collection of Baudelaire’s prose poems that Spleen adapts, Figurentheater similarly inhabits an enigmatic hybrid genre. Blending the puppet show with the musical interlude, Spleen pushes the limits of both forms, demonstrating not so much their compatibility but their irreconcilability. In doing so, they adapt the spirit of the prose poem itself: a fragmentary, contradictory form that captured, for Baudelaire, the inherent limitations and unresolvable incongruities of modern life. 

Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, published posthumously in 1869, explores the contradictions of modernity. Baudelaire coined the term “spleen” to capture a feeling of modern malaise. The term originates from the Greek notion of “humors” in which the spleen was thought to produce black bile, an excretion associated with melancholy. Baudelaire’s spleen, however, speaks to a kind of anguish that results from boredom, or as he describes in “The Bad Windowpane Maker”: “this sort of energy springs from ennui and reverie.” In order to capture the tensions within this modern condition, Baudelaire sought a new form, one that juxtaposes the limits of poetry with the limits of prose. “Who among us,” Baudelaire writes in his preface to the collection “has not…dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose that is musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and choppy enough to fit the soul’s lyrical movements, the undulations of reveries, the jolts of consciousness?” The prose poem, a narrative fragment that blends descriptive and lyrical language, was Baudelaire’s proposed response. 

Figurentheater’s adaptation guides us through these undulations and jolts, exploring the enigmatic musicality of Baudelaire’s prose poems and the strange characters that populate his fragmentary narratives. Charlotte Wilde plays the violin and guitar while Michael Vogel performs expressionistic puppet vignettes. Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone” and Elvis Presley’s “Don’t” both feature alongside the spoken text, adding a lilting sensuousness characteristic of both Cash and Presley’s vocal styles, which here accompany the world weariness of sustaining our desires brought out by Baudelaire. Baudelaire’s prose poems, read by children and prerecorded, provide accompanying spoken text. 

While Vogel’s puppets were not directly inspired by Baudelaire’s poems, they evoke many of the figures that languish throughout Baudelaire’s Paris. Our main figure is a dancing frog marionette with long, lithe legs who, perhaps because he is first on the scene and frequently reappears throughout the piece, takes on the character of the “I” in the various prose poems. Another recurring character is a cloaked skeleton wrapped in muslin with a long bone that the skeleton perches on his shoulder like a violin. In his other hand, he holds a long thin baton that he uses both as a bow and a conductor’s wand. As he conducts the spoken prose poems and plays along with Wilde’s violin, he acts like the master of ceremonies, providing the strange musicality that Baudelaire aims to evoke. These twin figures preside over the show and are at once menacingly comic—at one point our skeleton opens his mouth to reveal a giant lolling tongue–and languidly mischievous. 

We next meet a soporific female figure with gauzy hair that falls over her drowsy face. Her eyes are closed and her lips parted—she lives the “somnambulistic life” as Baudelaire describes it. She has an oversized head and a naked pear-shaped figure that adds to her weighted, besotted movements. Her limbs are long and fall loosely at her sides, while her legs drag on the ground. Her pelvis is her center of gravity, which she lazily sways back and forth. Vogel here captures the feminine spirit as it often appears in Baudelaire: a spirit at once sensual and despondent, provoking both our desire and disgust. This tension is reflected in Vogel’s design. Our somnambulist’s face is a mask that, once removed, reveals a shrunken, amphibious head with brightly painted red lips. She snaps her jaw and accentuates the movements in her hips and her limbs, which now swing rather than hang from her body. She gyrates and thrusts as Vogel attaches a feather  to her backside, reminiscent of a burlesque performer. In this world, when one awakes from reverie, one is jolted into a scene of dangerous seduction and voracious gluttony. 

A highlight of the piece is a Punch and Judy show that reenacts Baudelaire’s “The Old Showman.” A child’s voice reads aloud: “Pulchinellos and pantaloons, burned by the sun and toughened by wind and rain, made grotesque faces and…shot out their quips and jests and sallies.” Vogel delivers this scene exactly. A curtain is hung on a clothesline to make the Showman’s booth. A miniature head of our female somnambulist is stuck on the finger of one hand, blurring the narrative fragments of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris together. The head of a rooster is stuck onto the middle finger of our puppeteer’s other hand. The hands themselves make up the body of the puppet, with the rest of the fingers acting as the rooster’s feathers. Our puppeteer accompanies the show with the traditional swazzle. The performance follows the standard Punch and Judy show narrative as Punch kills his own baby and defeats both a policeman and the Devil, sending each of his foes through a meat grinder that turns them into sausage links. Interestingly, however, Vogel dons a stony mask halfway through—another recurring motif. He continues to perform, but this time from the other side of the curtain. Now watching the action from behind, we see the Grim Reaper rise from below the booth, sneaking up on Punch from behind as both face the back of the stage. 

While “vitality’s explosive frenzy,” as Baudelaire describes, may exist on one side of the booth, behind the curtain we encounter “misery decked out—to complete the horror—from the ragbag of comedy.” Here Figurentheater shows us how horror and comedy, misery and vitality, are stitched together. The ambivalent, ambient, apathetic quality of “spleen” arises from being held in the tension between these energetic poles, a tension that Wilde and Vogel beautifully create for us.