Possession: Baudelaire in a Box, Episode #5 (at Pivot Arts)
A one-week reprise at the Pivot Arts Festival!
We are pleased to bring back the latest installment of Baudelaire in a Box, as we share the bill with Manual Cinema at Edgewater & Uptown’s new Pivot Arts Festival. Theater Oobleck will present 16 cantastorias adapted from the work of Charles Baudelaire.
Baudelaire in a Box, Episode 5: Possession
and Manual Cinema’s ADA/AVA
Thursday, June 13 – Saturday June 15, 7:30pm
Sunday, June 16 AT 3pm ESSANAYSTUDIOS at ST. AUGUSTINECOLLEGE
1333 – 45 W. Argyle Street
(Where Charlie Chaplin used to make movies!)
Welcome to Oobleck’s19th-century movie house of ill-repute. Possession: Baudelaire in a Box, Episode #5 features songs of poison, betrayal, and shame to be washed down with longing, lust, and liquor. Charles Baudelaire’s notorious poems are performed by Ronnie Kuller, Chris Schoen, and Lindsey Whiting, as yards and yards of Dave Buchen’s beautiful and witty paintings scroll by as an interactive backdrop.
Chris, Ronnie, & Jeff Dorchen have each adapted five poems from Baudelaire’s 1857 book Les Fleurs du mal. Mucca Pazza accordionist Ronnie Kuller performs her five poems – including “The Fountain of Blood” and “Beauty” – in the original French. Mucca Pazza regular Lindsey Whiting sing Jeff Dorchen’s English adaptations of such poems as “Metamorphosis of the Vampire” and “The Ghost.” Chris Schoen performs his own translations of “Love and the Skull,” “The Cracked Bell,” and three more. As a nightcap, the prose poem “Get Drunk” will be performed by Dave Buchen.
Dubbed “an act of extravagant artistic idiosyncrasy” by the Chicago Reader, Baudelaire in a Box is a serial cantastoria project based on the work of Charles Baudelaire. Over the course of seven years (culminating in 2017, the sesquicentennial of Baudelaire’s death), the project will adapt each poem from Fleurs du mal as a unique cantastoria, pairing each musical adapation with “crankies” designed and illustrated by Dave Buchen. Over 30 poems have already been adapted and performed in Chicago, New York, North Carolina, San Juan, and Madison, Wisconsin, by Buchen, Schoen, and a motley cast of collaborators.
It is a project so ambitious, so immense, that it cannot be contained on a single web page. And so:
Here’s a video of Chris Schoen and Emmy Bean performing “Cupid and the Skull” from Possession.
Want an audio taste? Here’s a sneak preview from the forthcoming Baudelaire in a Box album “Heaven or Hell or Wherever,” featuring Schoen, Emmy Bean, John Szymanski, Ann Speroni (Art of Flying), and Heather Trost (A Hawk and a Hacksaw).
A video explanation of the cantastoria art form is presented by our colleague Clare Dolan here.
And learn more about Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal here.
We are performing as part of the inaugural Pivot Multi-Arts Festival, a celebration of innovative music, theater and dance June 6-22 throughout Uptown and Edgewater. See here for more information on the whole festival. For more info on Manual Cinema, go here.
A huge THANKYOU to all the dedicated artists, performers, composers, volunteers, donors, and audience members who made Closed Casket an unbelievable… we’ll leave it right there. An Unbelievable!
It exceeded even our foolhardy dreams for it. We even found our way onto a segment on NPR’s All Things Considered!
We’ve turned our last crank. The scrolls of artwork have been cut into sections and given to our collaborators and supporters. But the project lives on in photos and videos (stay tuned for updates), as well as studio albums and EPs of music from the series, with more on the way:
We also have some leftover merch from the show—artwork, mugs, totes— for sale here.
Breaking News: Half-day ticketing options are now available for the Saturday, August 5, mega-performance: Afternoon (w/ lunch) & Evening (w/ dinner). That’s right: delicious food is INCLUDED. Click for tix.
Thursday July 13 at 6:30pm Seminary Co-Op Bookstore
5751 S Woodlawn Ave. Chicago IL
Chris Schoen and Emmy Bean preview musical selections from Theater Oobleck’s upcoming Closed Casket: The Complete, Final and Absolutely Last Baudelaire In A Box, a project setting all of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal to music and performing it in tandem with scrolling illustrations. Following a brief presentation, the performers will be joined in discussion by Ira S. Murfin, on the experience of adapting, commenting on and annotating Baudelaire’s 150 year-old work through music, translation, and visual media.
At this very special air-conditioned performance, the band will perform a few songs from Baudelaire in a Box as well as other slow and gentle songs, and we will raffle off TWOFESTIVALPASSES — each an $85 value. Plus a preview of some Baudelaire merch, conviviality, and more. Our travel expenses for Closed Casket went well over budget so any additional monies will go to offset these unexpected costs.
Snail Band came into being in May of 2016 as part of Opera-Matic’s Joyful Passage: A Serenade to Humboldt Park, singing serenades of snails and slowness to a very secretive snail sculpture near the Humboldt Park Lagoon, with lovely lyrics by Cin Salach set to music by Ronnie Kuller as leisurely waltzes and unhurried tangos. Since then, Snail Band has slowed down various other Opera-Matic events in neighborhood parks, singing snail songs and performing instant odes generated by community event participants. Weegee’s Lounge is Snail Band’s first indoor venue, which is fitting, as snails are extremely photogenic and also very good at lounging.
Snail Band is Emmy Bean (Eighty Foots) on singing, Ronnie Kuller (Mucca Pazza, Mister Tom Musick) on accordion, piano, and singing, Julie Pomerleau (Bobby Conn) on violin and singing, and Joey Spilberg (Lamajamal, Schtedoidish) on double bass.
We sometimes talk about crankies being a kind of low-tech proto music video. And that’s true! But sadly you can’t share them very easily on social media. So, please to enjoy this newfangled Official Music Video from our latest Baudelaire In Box album, Unquenched, available now at our Bandcamp site!
From Unquenched: Music From Baudelaire In A Box Episode 9
Available at: theateroobleck.bandcamp.com
“The Drag” was composed by Ronnie Kuller, setting Mickle Maher’s translation of “L’avertisseur,” by Charles Baudelaire.
Videography by Cat Jarboe.
Snake images used with kind permission of Joseph Farah. See more of his beautiful reptile and amphibian photos at: reptilesofcolorado.com/about-me.html
To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the death of the great poet Charles Baudelaire, Oobleck is bringing 50 performers, composers, & musicians together from all over the world for a gigantic festival of song & image. But we need your help!
“The tunes borrow indiscriminately from Tin Pan Alley pop, vintage country, and coffeehouse folk … and they often feel self-consciously maudlin or perversely jaunty, as though they’re tweaking the turbid angst of Baudelaire’s poetry” —Chicago Reader
The King Of Rain is available now as a digital download ($9) or CD ($12) at our Oobleck Bandcamp store. CDs come with a 20-page booklet featuring song lyrics and original illustrations by Oobleck founding member Dave Buchen.
This seventh episode of Theater Oobleck’s Baudelaire in a Box sets lively new English translations of poems from the 1861 edition of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil to witty acoustic songs played by a six-piece ensemble…
The translations can be playful too—somehow I doubt Baudelaire’s original text uses “hummus” for a rhyme. Only once, on Sad Brad Smith’s rendition of “Grieving and Wandering,” does the troupe match bleak music to bleak verses, and the effect is so wrenchingly mournful it’s almost startling.
