Figurentheater Wilde&Vogel (DE) 

Spleen

Charles Baudelaire: Poems in Prose

Directed by: Hendrik Mannes

Performance & Puppets: Michael Vogel

Live-Music: Charlotte Wilde

Voices: Charlie Bunn, Hannah Ravalda, Catherine, Emily, Eve and Lawrence Smith 

Spleen is a kaleidoscope of pictures, songs and miniatures, inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s collection of poems in prose “Le Spleen de Paris,” which was published posthumously in 1869. Mankind on the threshold to modernity is described in the scenes played out between thirst for life and longing for death, between a romantic search for infinity and a brutal triviality. 

The play is open in this production: the performers are on the stage with puppets and musical instruments, Baudelaire’s texts are spoken by children and recorded on tape. The magic of this kaleidoscope develops in the imagination between actors, material and audience: A sequence of pictures and live-music, that wants to counterpoint Baudelaire’s vision of the world and open it for an understanding from the present.

You don’t know whether Vogel is Baudelaire or just playing, but there’s so much soul in his playing that you’re spellbound. — L’Express / CH

These scenic songs, which form a heterogeneous whole triggered by the text, plead softly, tenderly. As tenderly as Michael Vogel treats his characters. Bizarre animals like the gargoyles of Notre Dame, comedians, artists and princes, starving court jesters who dream of beauty. And rub their eyes as they awaken to the cheers of the audience. — Süddeutsche Zeitung / D

Through constant new experiments, Wilde & Vogel have changed the tradition, aesthetics and narrative style of their profession and brought the forms and formats of puppet/figure/object theater on a level with “human theater”. The more than 30 performances that have been created over the years show the different aspects of the group. Each has developed around its own core, with people and puppets, musicians and dancers, rarely with speech, often with singing. A wild bunch of artists with different talents and a lot of humor, including black humor. — Theater der Zeit / D

Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel, co-produced by FITZ! Stuttgart and  Westflügel Leipzig 

Financially supported by the Cultural Ministeries of Stuttgart, Leipzig and Baden-Württemberg and the Foundation of the Württembergische Hypothekenbank for Arts and Sciences

www.figurentheater-wildevogel.de