Fall 2010 Guide: Subways, Collages, Gesamtkunstwerk Oh My!
SEP 1, 2010
Visceral and sensuous. These are the words Jim and Ruth Bauer, creators of The Blue Flower, would like audiences to use when describing their work.
Visceral and sensuous. These are the words Jim and Ruth Bauer, creators of The Blue Flower, would like audiences to use when describing their work. The husband-and-wife team wants “people to enjoy it and let it just wash over them…just sound, and beauty and images, just absorbing.” Both Jim and Ruth’s backgrounds have led them to their distinct views on theater, art, and the experience of freeing oneself from the cerebral.
Jim, along with The Blue Flower cast member Meghan McGeary, formed the music duo DAGMAR in 2005, based on a song cycle Jim was writing “about a guy who can’t get out of bed in the morning and an insect goddess who plunges through the ether to rescue him.” With elements of rock and country, the band has been called “free-folk, dark, arty rock,” and, as one reviewer put it, “for those who like their music impregnated with theater larvae.” Like most new bands, DAGMAR started performing in small clubs and venues. But they wanted to reach more people: “If you’re doing the small club thing, you’re preaching to the choir, playing to thirty or forty of your best friends…if you can get them to come out.” Determined to reach a wider audience, Jim and Meghan took DAGMAR underground—to the subways of New York City. After auditioning and being selected to an elite roster with the Music Under New york program, DAGMAR started playing for the rush of New york City commuters.
In the Union Square subway station, DAGMAR played for audiences that would make Madison Square Garden seem small-time—more than a hundred people a minute were hearing their music. In addition to accidental audience members, Jim realized that DAGMAR was also attracting repeat listeners: “The first time, they just pay a little attention. The next time they come by, they stop and they listen for a minute. Then they listen for a song. Then they buy a CD.”
The sound of DAGMAR and The Blue Flower is addicted to a fusion of dark and light elements. Described as “Sturm n’ Twang” (a play on the eighteenth-century German literary movement called “Sturm und Drang” or “Storm and Stress”) and “Kurt Weill going tête-à-tête with Hank Williams,” Jim’s music for The Blue Flower synthesizes the dark hues of cello and bassoon with the bright pedal-steel guitar of his Texas upbringing. This play of light and dark anchors The Blue Flower.
If Jim is the ear, then Ruth Bauer, his wife, is the eye of the duo. A graduate of the acclaimed Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Ruth has always been interested in the art of collage—a form practiced by Weimar artists like Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch. Ruth also cites the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard and its collection of German Expressionist and Dada art as a major influence on her vision. As an artistic granddaughter of those movements— some of her professors at RISD had studied with German artists like Hans Hoffman and Max Beckmann—the creativity of Germany seduced her. After WWI, “the world was in pieces—the Dada artists were putting it together, […] mad with grief but trying to create things instead of destroying them,” says Ruth. Inspired by the Expressionist film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and the paintings of Franz Marc, Ruth began to experiment with video, which she calls “the ultimate painting, a palette that works with time and movement.” Her art fuses with her husband’s music to form a true Gesamtkunstwerk—total work of art. Jim is quick to point out that Ruth’s video not only furthers the narrative in The Blue Flower, but ultimately functions as a way of bringing in the audience: “A lot of times video used in installation art or in theater is there to sort of signify separation and distance…it’s the opposite [in Ruth’s work].” The video used in The Blue Flower does not just function as a simple visual backdrop, but as an interactive part of the characters’ environment and an integral part of their emotional makeup.
The Blue Flower reassembles music, art, and the corporeality of physical acting into a total theatrical event. With so many visually and aurally stunning elements, the Bauers want audiences to experience The Blue Flower on whatever level they choose—whether it be emotional or cerebral, the show welcomes response. As Jim says, “you just have to be open.”
Jenna Clark Embrey is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
