Le beau est toujours bizarre…

“The Beautiful is always strange.” Baudelaire’s life was strange, strained, and stained by controversy, but no study of 19th century French literature would be complete without his cynical view of the world. Baudelaire had a subtle understanding of beauty, in fact the whole quote says:

« Le beau est toujours bizarre. Je ne veux pas dire qu’il soit volontairement, froidement bizarre, car dans ce cas il serait un monstre sorti des rails de la vie. Je dis qu’il contient toujours un peu de bizarrerie, de bizarrerie non voulue, inconsciente, et que c’est cette bizarrerie qui le fait être particulièrement le Beau. »

In Baudelaire’s view, beauty is always strange, because beauty inevitably contains some oddness, some involuntary and unconscious oddness and it is precisely this obscurity which makes true beauty so unique and unparalleled. We also term it “The Sublime”.

Ever since we created Cabaret Bizarre 12 years ago, the grotesque and the obscure shade of beauty has accompanied us. Characterized by freedom of expression, sexuality and fantasy, Cabaret Bizarre was originally inspired by Federico Fellini and Bertolt Brecht to create settings of an old-fashioned carnival, an erotic wonderland, a dark dreamland where amazing personal adventures are made possible. Over the past 12 years, we have staged more than 50 shows in fifteen different cities around Europe. On our journey we met and meet creative, miraculous and visionary individuals – some of them are performance artists, some of them photographers, sculptors, conceptual artists and musicians, others are club kids, queer activists, revolutionaries and freaks. What they share, is a common appeal to beauty, more precisely the strangeness of beauty.

This art show is aimed at reflecting the diverse interpretation of beauty each of the exhibiting and performing artists has.

Join us on our sublime jour

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Projektleitung | A.D:   J. R. Knieza
3D Animation:              M. Pfäffli
Foto:                               J.R. Knieza

Client: Cabaret Bizarre
Categorie: Performance / Stage design
Date: Juni 2016