Flametti: Oder Vom Dandysmus Der Armen

The year is 1916. In a neutral Zurich teeming with refugees, draft-dodgers, and avant-garde artists, a man named Max Flametti runs a ragged vaudeville troupe on the edge of collapse. He pawns his last possessions to feed his performers. He fishes in the Limmat to put food on the table. He dodges the police through the vegetable market on the Gemusebrucke. And despite everything the world throws at him, he believes absolutely in the power of theatrical spectacle, staging an extravagant production called "The Indians at the Krokodil" as if his life depends on it. Hugo Ball, who would co-found the Cabaret Voltaire and write the Dada Manifesto that same year, drew on his own years of poverty and artistic struggle to create this unsparing portrait of a man who refuses to stop performing even when the curtain has already fallen. Flametti is the Willy Loman of vaudeville: a man for whom art is not luxury but oxygen, and who goes down swinging in a world that has already decided he's a failure.