Baudelaire Lies
A performance sampled and cut-up from the writings of Charles Baudelaire
by Reggie Prim






On July 2, 1867 poet Charles Baudelaire leaves Brussels and returns to Paris. He is stricken with paralysis and aphasia due to a number of strokes and small heart attacks. A long physical decline over the past two years is about to come to an end. He dies in his mother’s arms in Paris, on August 31, 1867 at the age of 46.

The play can be conceived as an in-between life and death review or Bardo crossing journey in which Baudelaire traverses the many worlds of memory as a prelude to expiration. Throughout the play, he appears at many stages of his life and in many guises: Critic, Dandy, School boy, Flaneur, Bohemian, Scholar, Exile, Indigent. Through the use of excerpts from his journals, criticism, poems, prose poems and letters, the play proceeds on its own vertical, intimate and internal time. Memories, incantations, arguments, reminiscences, recitals, and lamentations become the landscape upon which the poet leads us into his own death.





Baudelaire Lies debuted at Franklin Art Works
May, 2004