Jim and Ruth Bauer talk about the inspiration behind their show, The Blue Flower.
We began The Blue Flower with the purpose of expanding and animating our work as a musician and visual artist with the four-dimensionality of live theater. We had no particular theatrical form in mind as a model, goal, or destination— only the desire to exploit the narrative powers of sound, light, movement, and imagery in the magic of a staged environment, and to do it in a way that would blur the distinctions between “high art” and popular entertainment.
The project started with music—the visceral way music, particularly live musical performance, communicates to its audience—and a curiosity about the shifting mixture of and running competition between light and dark, playfulness and restlessness, hope and foreboding that flowed through much of the popular and stage music of the German Weimar period. Without a specific story in mind, only a mood to express, orchestration was conceived and music written in an attempt to capture some of the same color and feeling.
As songs without lyrics took shape, we began an examination of the Weimar Republic and the brief “world between two wars.” We were by necessity led back to the Great War that preceded it, the Belle Époque out of which the twentieth century seemed to spontaneously combust, and then further back through the longest period of uninterrupted peace and prosperity in European history. We finally reached 1889, the year in which we decided, for many reasons, the story would begin. In the course of our exploration we found inspiration for four fictional characters in the historical figures Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, Hannah Höch, and Marie Curie—three artists and a scientist—all four in ambitious pursuit of one thing or another, and all four drawn into the deep mud and unmoving trenches of the First World War. As we puzzled over why, counterintuitively, so many artists of the time eagerly marched off to war, a story began to take shape, and lyrics were woven into music that had been waiting for a sense of purpose and a place to go. It was 1999, the precipice of the new millennium, and the deeper we got into our subject, the more the fin of the present siècle was looking like the fin of the last. The parallels then were chilling, and are even more so now.
Inspired by the art and art movements of the early twentieth century—in particular Dada (in both its lyrical and its venal, politically charged forms), Surrealism, the golden age of German silent film, and the presiding spirit of pioneering artist Kurt Schwitters—the production is built as a collage, mirroring the intense interest in collage work immediately following the First World War. The world was in pieces both metaphorically and in reality, and the task was to make it whole again, put it back together in a way that made sense. The title comes from the symbol of the blue flower used initially by Novalis and other German romantic poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to signify the ongoing, never-ending search for artistic perfection. The blue flower later came to symbolize, for others, reincarnation: the opportunity to keep coming back, each time doing things perhaps a little less badly.
After many years of development and reincarnations, The Blue Flower has become a musical play, with the story of three artists, one scientist, and a love rectangle unfolding through the pages of a fairy tale book of collages that artist Max Baumann has been working on for years. The show is a playful Dada-inspired romp through Max’s closely protected memories, centering on the three friends and lovers he lost and the apparitions of events that overwhelmed their lives.
We dedicate The Blue Flower to the possibility of learning from history.
Jim Bauer and Ruth Bauer are the co-creators of The Blue Flower.
