THE SYMBOL OF THE BLUE FLOWER
The title of the show comes from the symbol of the blue flower used initially by Novalis and other German romantic poets of the 18th and 19th centuries to signify the ongoing search for artistic perfection. It evolved into an emblem of hope, a symbol for the simultaneous end to and beginning of all things, for reinvention and reincarnation, for the idea that after failing time and again, we can keep coming back, each time having the opportunity to do things a little less badly.
THE SHOW
The personal story told in The Blue Flower is a metaphor for the larger themes of the play. The story itself is about Max, a German artist who dies alone in New York City's Central Park in 1955. The show is a tragic and playful Dada-inspired romp through Max's closely-held memories unleashed at the moment of his death. It's about the three friends and lovers he lost and the apparitions of events that overwhelmed their lives during World War I and the restless post-war years of the Weimar Republic in Germany. The story unfolds through the pages of a Fairy Tale book of collages Max has been working on for many years that come to life on stage as a collage of text, movement, music, sound, light, and imagery with the aid of seven singer-actors, the 9-piece "Weimarband" on stage, and video projections that serve a key role in the staging.
The music blends the dark hues of 1920's Berlin cabaret with the insouciant charm of American country & western in a style composer Jim Bauer calls "Sturm n' Twang", or "Kurt Weill going tete-a-tete with Hank Williams."
The play is the creation of husband/wife team Jim Bauer (music, lyrics, script, videography) and Ruth Bauer (art, story and videography).
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
WEIMAR, the fragile German experiment in democracy after World War I, became a classic and singularly tragic confrontation between traditionalists and modernists, conservatives and liberals; between those who believe that what is past is pure and those who believe that what is new is better.
BY AND LARGE, events from the early part of the 20th century lie hidden in the long, deep shadows cast by Hitler, the Holocaust and World War II. Like a three-legged colossus, they stand so large in the middle of the century that it is difficult to see past them. But it is only by peering into those shadows that one can see how the 20th century took shape, and how the 21st may yet be sculpted.
We have always lived and, it seems, will always continue to live in or between two wars: whichever the last one was and whatever the next one will be. The years of the Weimar Republic in Germany, from the end of World War I in 1918 to the Nazi takeover in 1933, constituted another of our worlds between two wars. But the wars were not just any two, and the second followed the first with barely a breath between.
Almost immediately after concluding what was at the time the most destructive war in history -- nearly ten million dead and the trenches never moved more than ten miles in either direction -- the wheels began turning for a new war that would break yet again all records for atrocity.
The poisoned gases of the First World War never really cleared before the Second World War began. By some reckoning, World War I was not finally concluded until 1994, when the last Russian soldiers left German soil. By another calculation, The Great War was not the "war to end all wars" as Woodrow Wilson had hoped, but the "war that never ended."
At the beginning of the 21st century we are still rearranging the debris and alternately dressing and salting the wounds created by the war and the Versailles Treaty that concluded it. It's this treaty Islamic extremists allude to when saying that after 80 years, the axe will finally come down on the west.
The fact that it was so recent is all that keeps Weimar from seeming mythological. In the short-lived world between the last century's two giant wars, the most highly charged aspects of human experience were tightly compressed into a dense and haunting emotional package. Stunned by the sudden growth in destructive capabilities made possible by new technology, and reflecting grimly on what they had done, people -- particularly those on the losing side of a particularly pointless war -- were justified in feeling confused about most anything.
Through valid institutions and legitimate societies we had behaved in the most indecent ways imaginable. How were we to judge and who was to say now what was decent and what was not? The Great War had mugged the world and disfigured the planet, the empty trenches like jagged scars across its face. Every rule had been broken, and the slate wiped brutally, if unintentionally, clean. There was nothing left but to begin again, and, in the minds of many, to begin by inventing a whole new set of rules.
In the beginning, ballast for heavy grief and suffocating remorse was provided by a weightless sense of relief, a buoyant feeling of optimism. There was a burst of creativity, a sense of freedom, adventure and open horizons, a feeling that the world could be made anew. The Weimar spirit was driven in part by the possibility and thrill of creating things instead of destroying them, building them up instead of tearing them down. Geographical borders and sexual boundaries were re-drawn, social roles redefined, and little remained constant from one day to the next. In Germany, Jews could hold public office for the first time, and people were allowed to vote, even women. Art, architecture, literature, music, dance, theater and film exploded with new theories and excitement. Everything was in question, everything fair game, and at every turn lay opportunities for reinventing the world, from Russian-style communism to Gropius' Bauhaus to Schoenberg's tone rows.
But Weimar was also a world fractured into many pieces and deeply divided: outwardly blooming with hope but inwardly trembling with fear of and gnawing doubts about the horrors of the past and the shadows those horrors cast on an uncertain future.
With a demagnetized compass and a broken rudder, society swirled freely about in a political, economic and cultural maelstrom until Hitler, wasting little time and with a keen eye for opportunity, found a way to make things appear simple.
UNDERSTANDING MAXPERANTO
In the play, the main character Max speaks only in an improvised language he calls "Maxperanto". Why? Good question. It should be noted that each actor cast in the role of Max is to develop his own version of this invented language.
During the Nazi regime in the 1930’s and 40’s, it was not uncommon for Germans fleeing oppression to choose to stop speaking German altogether, in part out of shame, in part out of protest. The fictional Blue Flower character Max Baumann took it a step further. He stopped speaking real language altogether. His reasons went beyond political protest. It was a form of art for him, something like painting, a form of expression, a method for getting beyond words to a style of communication that was more pure, more real, more accurate.
For the fictional Max and the historical Dada writers, poets and performers, language had betrayed them. Max stops speaking real language when he is declared by the “authorities” to be a “degenerate artist”. As all generations at some point learn, language can be and is often used as a tool of deception and oppression. It can be abused for hurtful, selfish and sinister purposes. Witness our modern age of mass media and the many abuses language suffers, the heavy prices we pay and will continue to pay as a result. Think about Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” factor.
The inspiration for Maxperanto comes from two primary sources. First is the enthusiasm at the turn of the 20th century for the idealistic notion of one-world-one-people commonality (like Franz Marc and Wassilly Kandinsky’s “Blaue Reiter” art movement/manifesto), and the invention of the experimental universal language of Esperanto by L. L. Zamenhof (aka: Doktoro Esperanto, or “Dr. Hopeful”) in 1887, two years before the story of the The Blue Flower begins. Max Baumann is in effect a child of the Esperanto Generation.
Second, and more importantly, Dada poets, writers and performers experimented with the abstraction of language in the same way and for the same purpose visual artists experimented with the abstraction of imagery: to reveal the “meaning behind the thing”. Abstract artists break images down to their component parts: shape and color. Dada poets broke language down to its component parts -- sounds and syllables -- to reveal the meaning behind the words, to get at the real “truth”. For Max Baumann, the meaning of what is uttered and the emotion in the utterance is more important than the words that are spoken. It’s like music. It’s like singing, which explains – for those who need explanations -- why Max has no trouble singing in English.