Content area
Full text
"Let us destroy let us be good let us create a new force of gravity NO = YES Dada means nothing...and I hate good sense."
- Tristan Tzara "Zurich Chronicle"
I
Several years after Alfred Jarry's Ubu legacy, Dada abruptly erupted. More than just an antagonistic de-evolution into babytalk and probably more fun than riding a hobby horse, Dada surfaced on the war-era wave with a fresh irrationality, contaminating the minds of a whole generation of artists much to the gathering's delight.1 Though Dada is now widely acknowledged as one of the major founts of modem avant-garde drama and the direct forerunner to Surrealism and other extensions of the Theatre of the Absurd, few if any dramatic surveys (or their glossaries) mention Dada at all. This hardly seems fair, after all, when it is Dada's petulant anarchism which allowed radical playwrights like Jean Genet to carry the torch to a higher level of social anarchism decades later. In part, then, this survey hopes to repair such an oversight.
Beginning in the war-neutral city of Zurich, Switzerland, early in I9I6, Dada took its cue from a number of sources: German Expressionist circles, the Soirees de Paris group, Italian Futurists and the avant-garde anarchists surrounding America's "29 I" art gallery.2 Dada detonated closely on the heels of Expressionism's attempts to present inner experiences through depictions of distorted external reality. As art, Expressionism's degeneration was considered by the newly organized Dadaists as a "maudlin, established form," worthy of little more than "contempt," as described by Malcolm Green in the preface to the I993 re-release of Richard Huelsenbeck's Dada Almanach (1920).3 Dada, in fact, struck out against all -isms, previous art movements that, in effect, exhaustively and systematically (if not wrongly) emphasize the timeless and universal aspects of art without ever living the moment.4 Although Dada was first derived in Zurich, German and French forms of Dada eventually flowered, differing in their individual intonations on art and politics, yet all underlining the probing spirit of art through language.
Dada's parentage rests in the husband-wife combination of Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. By their hands, artists responded to a general call to appear at the Cabaret Voltaire (the first public Dada forum and also the name of Dada's first...