DADA PERFORMANCE AT THE CABARET VOLTAIRE

BY FEBRUARY 1916, ZURICH had filled with refugee artists and literati. All in financial straits and fired by artistic convictions, they decided to open a literary-artistic cabaret of their own.

The cabaret, a bar rented from one Herr Ephraim at No. 1 Spiegelgasse in Niedenford (a slightly disreputable quarter which boasted among its tenants of the period Lenin,¹ Radek and Zinoviev) had 15 to 20 tables, a seating capacity of 35 to 50 and a stage of about 100 square feet. The room was hung with the paintings of Kandinsky, Léger, Matisse, and Klee, and with etchings by Picasso. At six o’clock on the evening of February 5, 1916, Hugo Ball was still busy hammering and putting up Futurist posters when,

there appeared an oriental-looking deputation of four little men with portfolios and pictures under their arms, bowing politely many times. They introduced themselves: Marcel Janco, the painter, Tristan Tzara, Georges Janco and a fourth whose name I did not catch. Arp was also there, and we came to an understanding without many words. Soon Janco’s opulent “Archangels” hung alongside the other objects of beauty.

That same evening, the place was full to bursting with “painters, students, revolutionaries, tourists, international crooks, psychiatrists, the demi-monde, sculptors, and police spies on the lookout for information.” The nightclub, “a center for artistic entertainment,” and its innovative program, became an overnight success.

The soirées that were held at the Cabaret Voltaire between February and July, 1916, and later at the Galerie Dada, were shaped in the main by Hugo Ball, then thirty, Tristan Tzara, twenty, Marcel Janco, twenty-one, Jean Arp, twenty-nine, and Richard Huelsenbeck, twenty-four. Janco, the young Rumanian architect and painter, and Arp were responsible for the group’s work with masks and for set and costume design. Huelsenbeck emphasized the work with language. Tzara at first played the circus barker and general factotum although he quickly assumed both artistic and administrative control. But it was Hugo Ball who largely initiated the group’s theatrical experiments. Ball, born in Primasues, Germany, on February 22, 1886, attracted to the theater in his youth, by the age of eighteen had written two plays: an imitation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and an original script, Der Henker von Brescia (which remained uncompleted until he was twenty-seven). A third play, Die Nase des Michaelangelo, was written in 1908 at the age of twenty-two, and published in 1911. In all of his plays, Ball resorted to grotesque caricature to launch a strong polemical attack against the evils of the world as he saw them. The works bear no mark of the beginnings of a promising dramatist. At this time, during his studies at the University of Munich, Ball became heavily immersed in the works of Nietzsche and wrote his dissertation, entitled “A Polemical Treatise in Defense of Nietzsche.” Ball formulated his own Dionysian theory of art based on the instinctive and unconscious elements in man through Nietzsche and through that philosopher’s attraction to the work of Wagner.

To this end he left the university and in 1910 enrolled in Max Reinhardt’s School of Dramatic Art in Berlin. His career at the school, and in the professional theater as a whole, was a disappointment. He proved to be a poor actor and decided to take up critical writing and stage-management. But at the Stadttheater in Plauen and at the Münchner Kammerspiele, his work as stage manager and Dramaturg led to similar dissatisfactions. About 1912–13, however, Ball did begin to lead the after-theater-cafe-life common to both the Munich and Berlin Bohemian set of painters and writers: among them Richard Huelsenbeck (who later joined him in Zurich), Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky,and Oskar Kokoschka. Stimulated by his circle of avant-garde intellectuals, writers, and artists, Ball saw a breakthrough in the use of the creative and stimulating power of the unconscious, the type of work that he had hoped to achieve in the theater.²

Writing in his diary Ball noted:

In 1914, when I was thinking over the plan of a new theatre, I was convinced of this: a theatre which experiments beyond the realm of day-to-day preoccupations. Europe paints, composes, and writes verse in a new way. A fusion not merely of all art, but of all regenerative ideas. The background of colors, words and sounds must be brought out from the subconscious and given life, so that it engulfs everyday life and all its misery.

All theater projects were momentarily set aside at the outbreak of the war. Ball volunteered several times for the German army but after a brief stint was discharged (though not permanently) because of a weak heart. Under some strange compulsion, in November, 1914, Ball traveled to the Belgian battlefront to witness the war at firsthand. What he saw was fearful, shocking, and tragic beyond anything the theater could produce. His immediate reaction was to turn inward, into the writing of a novel, and the further study of Chinese theater. The novel, Laurentius Tenderenda, explored certain linguistic, rhythmic, and vocal devices that appeared later in his Zurich work. Through the world of the Chinese theater, Ball attempted to lose himself in music and rhythm; this finally led him hack to theater and the unconscious. In 1915 Ball was twenty-nine. He had linked his life to that of Emmy Hennings, a cabaret singer, and tormented, restless and disgusted with Germany, and the war, he fled with her to Zurich.

None of the founders of Cabaret Voltaire came to that venture with the theatrical background of Ball. In the ten months that separated his arrival in Zurich from the founding of the Cabaret, Ball and Emmy Hennings, reduced to destitution, found work as performers. Hennings sang at a cabaret and Ball was engaged as a pianist with a wandering troupe called “Flamingo.” After eight hours of piano playing every evening, Ball spent several hours each day directing and training the players in new parts and new songs because the programs had to be constantly changed. Whatever the degrading aspects of this vaudeville life, there is no doubt that in many of its aspects it is quintessential theater. There are few better ways than vaudeville to learn to “work” an audience, to construct and reconstruct material, to be “up,” to find sources of energy when there are none—to mold an often banal activity into a theater piece. Although such players are rarely dealing with the work of actor as character, they are always working at the role of actor as performer. Thus, Ball moved from theater scholarship to professional theater, to working in a mobile variety show—a movement always closer and closer to the roots of theater itself. Despite the arduous demands of road-show life, Ball continued the experiments with words he had begun in his novel and furthered his explorations through a correspondence with Marinetti, the Italian Futurist who had sent him his own Parole in libertà.

In the light of Ball’s theatrical and philosophical background, the direction taken by the Cabaret Voltaire is hardly surprising.³ The nightly performances were structured much like a variety or cabaret show. “Acts” followed one upon the other and tended to fall into one of three categories:

1. dances and skits, many employing masked performers;

2. work with rhythm and music, with “natural sound” (those sounds which the human voice is capable of making without the aid of extensions of any kind (e.g., instruments, machines) and noise-music (“bruitism”).

This second category spills over into the third:

3. readings of simultaneous and phonic poetry (here language often assumed the values of pure sound and incantation), and of manifestoes.

The impressionistic notes of Tzara’s “Zurich Chronicle” record the evenings as “silence, music—declaration . . . latest rage the big drum . . . cubist tinkle dance . . . great enchanted gyratory movement of 400 persons celebrating . . . music, dances, theories, manifestoes, poems, paintings, costumes, masks.”

How were the programs decided upon and rehearsed? What led the Dadas to give the kind of performance they did? At the beginning, much of the program was catch-as-catch-can, though basically literary in intent. On the first evening Tzara gave a reading of his poems “which he rather endearingly fished out of the various pockets of his coat.” Readings of modern German, Russian, and Swiss poets accompanied readings from Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Alfred Jarry, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud. Old and new music was played, and new paintings were constantly replacing those already hung. Once the evenings were on their way, however, the group seems to have formulated a sense of itself as a “closed” group aswell as feeling for what the performances would contain, and in what direction performance experiments would proceed. Intrusions, interferences, and spontaneous contributions from outside the group were not appreciated. As Janco writes, “sometimes a young man would get up on the rostrum and read his poetry, sometimes there might be a group asking for permission to give a balalaika concert. We suffered them all in patience and then imperturbably got on with our simultaneous poems.”

The manner in which the group created as-a-group is perhaps best illustrated by the work with Janco’s masks, a number of which had been made for the new show. They were cardboard cutouts, painted and glued, and Ball describes them as recalling the Japanese or ancient Greek theater, and yet appearing wholly modern. “What altogether fascinates us about these,” Ball notes in his diaries, “is that they personify beings and embody passions larger than life. The dread of our times, the paralyzing background of things is made visible.” Arp recalls them as “terrifying, most of them daubed with bloody red. Out of cardboard, paper, horsehair, wire, and cloth. . . .” They were designed to make their effect at a distance, and in the relatively small space of the cabaret, the result was astonishing.

We were all there when Janco arrived with the masks, and each of us put one on. The effect was strange. Not only did each mask seem to demand the appropriate costume; it also called for a quite specific set of gestures, melodramatic and even close to madness. Although five minutes earlier none of us had had the remotest idea of what was to happen, we were soon draped and festooned with the most unlikely objects, making the most outlandish movements, each out-inventing the other. The dynamism of the masks was irresistible. In one moment we became aware of the great importance of such masks in mime and drama. The masks simply demanded that their wearers should start up a tragico-absurd dance.

An improvisatory situation had been touched off by the stimulus the masks provided and the group proceeded to invent a number of “dances” for which Ball, on the spot, wrote short musical pieces. The dances, as Ball describes them, seem largely vehicles for the display of the mask. In themselves they appear hardly more than a single “bar” of dance (to borrow the musical terminology), evidencing no development, incapable of being sustained. In this they foreshadow much of the later Dada work.

One of the dances we called “Flycatching.” This particular mask went with clumsy, tentative steps, long-armed snatching gestures and nervous, shrill music. The second dance we called “Cauchemar.” The dancer unfolds from a stooping posture, at the same time moving straight forward. Her mask has a wide open mouth and a broad, twisted nose. The performer’s arms, menacingly raised, are lengthened by means of special tubes. We called the third dance “Festive desperation.” The arms are curved to form an arch and from them dangle long golden cut-out hands. The figure turns several times to the left and to the right, then slowly revolves and ends by suddenly collapsing into a heap before slowly returning to the first position and starting again.

Repeatedly we find references to the emphasis on masks. Tzara, in his “Zurich Chronicle,” writes “les plus importants sont les masques et les effets de revolver . . .” (“the most important were the masks and the gunshots . . . ”) and a participant at one of the soirées, in a personal letter wrote:

Toute espèce de masque était bonne pour les dadaistes. Il reste á savoir si chacun avait choisi le masque qui lui convient. Mais le masque était nécessaire, it tenait lieu de refuge souterrain pour cacher des visages trop bouleversés.⁴

All types of mask were good for the Dadaists. We still don’t know if each one chose the mask which suited him. But the mask was essential; it served as the underground refuge to hide the overagitated faces.

Georges Burand, in his work Les Masques, sees the mask as the key to an understanding of Dada performance.

L’homme se trouve mis soudain devant une image de lui qu’il ne soupçonnait pas et qui le plonge dans l’épouvante. Sa confiance en lui, en la vie même, disparait. II est aux limites de sa folie. L’horreur que communique le masque grotesque dégénéré est purement négative et destructive . . . N’est-ce pas là, plutôt que par des explications tardives et nettement politisées, qu’on tient la clé de voûte de la provocation dadaïste?⁵

Man suddenly finds himself placed in front of our image of himself which he never suspected and which plunges him into despair. His confidence in himself, in life itself, vanishes. He verges on madness. The horror which the grotesque degenerate mask communicates is completely negative and destructive. . . . Is it not here, rather than in conservative and clearly civil analyses that one finds the touchstone of Dada provocation?

The group and their work had not yet become Dada, but slowly there developed a unity which resulted from no seeming act of will, a pattern of mutual stimulation which, in the coming months, helped the group define itself, both to itself and before its audiences. Much of this self-definition came from the work on simultaneous poetry, rhythm, and natural sound.

The origins of Simultaneism as we see it developed by the Dadaists, were much influenced by the work of Apollinaire. Robert Delaunay’s Portrait of 1911, a monochrome picture with five versions of the figure spreading from a common base along the top of the canvas, and his 1912 experiments with spectrumlike arrangements of pure color which he called “simultaneous windows,” crossed the frontier of figurative painting and were celebrated by Apollinaire in his poem, named, like the paintings, Les Fenêtres.

The yellow fades from red to green . . .

You will lift the curtain

And now look at the window opening

Spiders when hands wove the light

Beauty paleness unfathomable violet tints.

Composed of seemingly disconnected, partially self-sufficient phrases and ideas, which by their placing and interaction serve to evoke both form and atmosphere, this poem was one of the first in which Apollinaire eliminated punctuation. For Delaunay’s art, Apollinaire revived the ancient term “Orphism,” a term which points at analogies with the nonimitative qualities of music. In “Les Peintres Cubistes” he lists “Orphism” as the most advanced of the four categories of Cubism and defines it as

. . . the art of painting new harmonies out of elements borrowed not from visual reality but created entirely by the artist and endowed by him with a powerful presence. The works of Orphist artists should offer simultaneously a sensation of pure aesthetic enjoyment, a structure of which the senses are hardly aware and a profound content, in other words, a subject. This is pure art.⁶

Writing on the Salon des Indépendants in March, 1913, Apollinaire referred to “L’Orphisme, peinture pure, Simultaneité” and the two terms thus became largely synonymous. It is out of Orphism that Simultaneism grew. Its birth was not an easy one. Apollinaire and Henri Martin (an author who wrote under the name Barzun) carried on a long and violent polemic over its paternity in the pages of the Paris-Journal. In his Manifeste sur le simultanéisme poètique, published in 1913, Barzun claimed to have invented what he called “literary simultaneism.” At his side stood a group founded and dominated by the poets Canudo and Valentine Saint-Point who edited Montjoie, a review devoted to finding the link between various arts and investigating their common tendencies. This publication and the review Poème et Drame, which began publication about 1913–14, were at the center of the Simultaneist movement and published the poèmes-simultanées of Barzun and Fernand-Divoire.⁷ Apollinaire meanwhile, in defense of his paternity, pointed to the plastic ideas he had championed for so long, as they erupted in the typographical arrangements of his “Calligrams” and his “conversation-poems”—all punctuation is omitted and there is no attempt to clarify the circumstances which produced the disconnected sentences.

In terms of Dada performance the importance of Simultaneism is in its new grasp of structure—a structure which is the “opposite of narration,“ which represents “an effort to retain a moment of experience without sacrificing its logically unrelated variety.” Simultaneism presented a plurality of actions at the same time. Abridged syntax and unpunctuated abruptness merged disparate moments into an instantané. Passages were set one next to another in order to stress the conflict between them rather than the link. This contiguous relationship is what Roger Shattuck refers to as “juxtaposition”: the setting of one thing beside another without a connective. From here it is but a short jump to obscurity, illogicality, and abruptness, to surprise, shock, and “chance.“

The Dadas, as much “poètes fondés en peinture” as Apollinaire, challenged the limits of Simultaneism in the area of performance. Ball defines the performance qualities of Simultaneism as experience beyond canvas and paper into three-dimensional space and actual time. Simultaneous poetry, he writes, is

a contrapuntal recitative in which three or more voices speak, sing, whistle, etc., simultaneously in such a way that the resulting combinations account for the total effect of the work, elegaic, funny or bizarre.

And Huelsenbeck describes it as an abstraction referring to the occurrence of different events at the same time:

It presupposes heightened sensitivity to the passage of things in time. . . . and attempts to transform the problem of the ear into a problem of the face. Simultaneity is against what has become, and for what is becoming. While I, for example, become successively aware that I boxed an old woman on the ear yesterday and washed my hands an hour ago, the screeching of a streetcar brake and the crash of a brick falling off the roof next door reach my ear simultaneously and my (outward or inward) eye rouses itself to seize, in the simultaneity of these events, a swift meaning of life. From the everyday events surrounding me (the big city, the Dada circus, crashing, screeching, steam whistles, house fronts, the smell of roast veal), I obtain an impulse which starts me toward direct action, becoming the big X. I become directly aware that I am alive, I feel the form-giving force behind the bustling of the clerks in the Dresdner Bank . . . and so ultimately a simultaneous poem means nothing but “Hurrah for life!”

Experiments in simultaneity led to multiple voices reading poems and manifestoes, and the simultaneous reading of unrelated texts (often in different languages). In trying to explain the impact of such poems on the audience, Moholy-Nagy wrote:

. . . without one’s having been able to register its exact meaning, a mutation occurred: clearly, a fabric became comprehensible . . . in a very suggestive unconscious way, through the magic of the words, their affinities and modulations. This was the result of a new lyric expression, like an x-ray revelation, making transparent that which was previously opaque; a new structure and topography of the psychological existence, the rendering of psychological space-time.⁸

This “psychological space-time,” evoked by the juxtaposition of unrelated words, verbal free-association, and “inane sonority,” comes close to Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of “inner speech”: a montage concept based on the collision of images. In his film criticism, Eisenstein writes:

If montage must be compared with something, then a phalanx of montage-pieces, “shots,” should be compared to the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, multiplying themselves into montage dynamics and thereby serving as “impulses” to drive along a tearing motor car or tractor.

The “montage” concept is helpful in looking at much of Dada and Surrealist performance. The collision impact in performance is not, however, due to the verbal element alone. There was something visual “going on” on stage as well. At the very least there were the facial expressions of the performers as they moved mouths and focused eyes in their readings of the texts. As we see in a photograph of Kurt Schwitters reciting a phonic poem, the facial contortions were no small factor in capturing the attention of the audience and leaving an impact. Crimped eyes, gaping mouth, and focus askew and shifting were not the usual diet of a poetry-hungry public. And, as we shall soon see, costume elements of “character” and “activity” were also added.

Still, the impact of the verbal element remains indisputable, and the shift was soon made from simultaneous poems based on recognizable words to phonetic freedom. In L’amiral cherche une maison à louer, the simultaneous poem read by Huelsenbeck, Janco, and Tzara, meaning quickly fades into incantation. The reading opened with Huelsenbeck intoning, “Ahoi, ahoi! Des Admirals qwirktes Beinkleid schnell zerfällt,” while Janco sang “Where the honny [sic] suckle wine twines itself around” and Tzara shouted “Bourmboum boum II déshabilla sa chair quand les grenouilles humides commencèrent à bruler.” In the rhythmic interlude which followed each stanza, Huelsenbeck pounded on a bass drum and chanted “hihi Yaboumm,” Tzara endlessly repeated the words “rouge bleu” in rhythm with his castanets, and Janco played a counterrhythm on a whistle.

How was one to understand a text that read:

O O O O O O

or

prrza chrraz

or

zimzim urallala zimzim urallala zimzim

zanzibar zimzallazam?

Ball answers, “The subject of the poem simultané is the value of the human voice,” and the phonetic poem⁹ in performance had become “an act of respiratory and auditive combinations, firmly tied to a unit of duration.” The performer wheezed, gasped, wailed, and sputtered out the letters and sounds. In Ball’s own words, “The poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases.” In his attempt to transcend language he first comes to sounds and then to noise.

Noises (a drawn out rrr sustained for minutes on end, sudden crashes, sirens wailing) are existentially more powerful than the human voice . . . the noises represent the inarticulate, inexorable and ultimately decisive forces which constitute the background. The poem carries the message that mankind is swallowed up in a mechanistic process. In a generalized and compressed form it represents the battle of the human voice against a world whose rhythms and whose din are inescapable.

The rhythms that were chosen were often African, employing real tom-toms to accompany the different “tarred and feathered players” and finally imitating phonetically the sound of drums to “drum literature into the ground,”

damai da dai umbala damo

Sokobauno sokobauno sokobauno

Richard Huelsenbeck, who had joined the Cabaret circle at the end of February, 1916, especially expressed a love for “Negro Rhythm” and he and one Jan Ephraim, who had spent some time in Africa, organized “African Nights.” Huelsenbeck recited his poems to the beat of a drum or marked out their rhythm by cracking a riding whip in the air. The performers chanted and Ball composed a noise-concert which featured such instruments as shawms, little bells especially devised for the purpose, and babies’ rattles. The “primitive” exercised a strong attraction for the Dadas. Masks were used to cry out the deepest and most passionate feelings of the actor-performers and rhythms to speak feelings as well. Cowbells, drums, and blows on tables joined to excite an audience which had previously sat impassive behind its beer mugs. Tzara wrote articles comparing primitive and Western art and published some 40 “African poems.” The press wrote, “They are men possessed, outcasts, maniacs, and all for the love of their work. They turn to the public as if asking its help, placing before it the materials to diagnose their sickness.”

Although these early efforts may have appeared to be “asking the help” of the audience, it soon became clear that Ball, Tzara & Co. had something else in mind. They, and all those in the later Dada-Surrealist group who consciously concerned themselves with the use of the theatrical medium (Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vitrac, Artaud . . .) posed as a primary condition the restoration of a type of theatrical communion which demanded a change in attitude on the part of the public. The proscenium-oriented passive spectator must give way to a hostile participant, constantly provoked, attacked, and beaten by author and actors. As Ribemont-Dessaignes writes in déjà jadis (his recollections of the Dada period):

Enfantillages en apparence, mais soit que les textes fussent d’une extrême violence, soit qu’ils fussent présentés par leur propre auteur (et non comme avait été indiqué) de façon désarticulée ou cocasse et particulièrement provocante, l’assistance réagit sans mesure. L’essentiel était atteint. Il fallait obtenir l’hostilité, au risque de passer pour de sinistres imbéciles.

Childish as it may seem, whether the texts were extremely violent, or whether they were acted by their individual authors (and not as was indicated) in an inarticulate or comical and especially provocative manner, the audience reacted beyond all bounds. The essential had been attained. One had to incite hostility even at the risk of passing for sinister imbeciles.

From the small stage of the Cabaret Voltaire, the performers “did not neglect from time to time to tell the fat and utterly uncomprehending Zurich philistines that they regarded them as pigs” and, as Marcel Janco proudly noted, “we made our good fellow citizens roar like lions.”

After the first few months of experimentation, the group at the Cabaret Voltaire—Janco, Ball, Arp, Tzara, Huelsenbeck, and Emmy Hennings—took the name “Dada” to describe their work. Despite the great controversy over the origin of the name and its meaning, Hans Arp wrote:

I am convinced that this word is of no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can take an interest in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before Dada came into existence . . . .

Dada’s combined stand of “anti”-art, antihistory, antipermanence and prospontaneity makes it quite a simple step to an understanding of the Dadas’ valuing of “process” (the manner by which the work is accomplished) above “product” (the work itself).

The efficacy of art to the extent that Dada admitted it at all, lay in the purposeful act of making it. The object created was not an end in itself and consequently nothing to be prized.

With everything called into question and the spontaneous emissions of the “self” reigning supreme, it is not surprising that the audience experiences Dada theater as primitive, obscure, and childlike, as evocative of laughter which is often the product of embarrassment, and rage which is sometimes a product of fear. The Dada clown danced on the boundary between exultation and manic excess. He placed himself (the artist) and the moment of his creation (the process) at the center of the world.¹⁰ Perhaps for this reason the Dada artist became an actor, a maker of theater. For the actor process and product merge. Though there are many moments in performance which are the products of rehearsal “decisions,” still the creative art in its totality must occur at every performance anew, and to work his art truly the actor must constantly remain open and “in the process of.” Once the actor has finished his performance, nothing of his “art” remains visible. This is in perfect accord with the Dadas’ expressed desire to leave behind as few completed works as possible. For this reason as well, to look at the “theater” of Dada is to look at Dadain-performance. Tzara’s Première and Deuxième Aventures de M. Antipyrine and Le Coeur à Gaz are the only authentic “plays” of the movement. Tzara’s later plays and the short plays of Paris Dada are more aptly considered within the framework of Surrealism or the avant-garde of the French 1920s. It is the actor-performer then who is at the center of Dada theater. However, the Dada concept of the actor is, of course, perverted to the extent that he must be an “anti-”actor. All established craft is ignored. The Dada actor has his unskilled body and a spirit capable of spontaneous emanations. He has his manifestoes and poems, some pots and bells, cardboard and paint, a chair or two and perhaps a bed-sheet. Rehearsal and the work of the director go out the window. Improvisation takes over. Marcel Janco writes,

all our sketches were of an improvised nature, full of fantasy, freshness and the unexpected. There were few costumes, little direction, and few sets.

The role played by the audience remains ambivalent. On the one hand Tzara claims “Art is a private affair, the artist does it for himself,” and the Dadas give us many examples of purely gratuitous acts performed for the doer’s own gratification and no one else’s. The pervading feeling is, however, that the audience was indispensable to the Dada performer. It served to stimulate, delight, and enrage him. With it he became a circus act, a breathing collage, a chanting, incanting medicine man, a provocateur.

The Dadas in their manifestoes never concern themselves with the theory of performance per se and in this they do the theater critic a service. All too often theoretical doctrines restrict the observing eye inasmuch as they present a mold into which one then attempts to fit the examples. No antiartist can be expected to follow his principles consistently and what Albert Einstein said speaking of theoretical physicists, well applies to the Dadas:

If you want to find out anything about the methods they use . . . I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don’t listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds.

—Annabelle Henkin Melzer

This is the first part of a two-part article excerpted from a book in process on Dada performance. The second half will be published In the December issue.

Unless otherwise specified, materials quoted in the text are from the following sources: Willy Verkauf, ed., Dada: Monograph of a Movement, New York, 1917 ; Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Poets and Painters, New York, 1951; Lucy Lippard, ed., Dadason Art, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1971; Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, déjà-jadis, Paris, 1958; William Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, New York, 1968; and Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, New York, 1965.

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NOTES

1. Lenin, perhaps in response to what he witnessed at the Cabaret Voltaire, wrote, “I will not admit that the creations of expressionism, futurism, cubism and all the other ‘isms’ are the highest revelation of artistic genius. I do not understand them and they do not give me pleasure.”

2. Ball attempted to work with Kandinsky on some revolutionary stage-setting along the lines of Japanese andChinese art, but the project was never realized.

3. Richard Huelsenbeck writes that the name “Cabaret Voltaire” was not accidentally chosen. It was selected “out of veneration for a man who had fought all his life for the liberation of the creative forces from the tutelage of the advocates of power.”

4. “Lettre de M. Hennings,” quoted in Robert Maguire, Le hors théâtre: Essai sur la signification du théâtre de notre temps. Doctorat d’Etat à la Sorbonne, 1963, p. 68.

5. Georges Burand, Les Masques, Paris, 1948, p. 85.

6. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Les Peintres Cubistes,” in John Golding, Cubism; a history and an analysis 1907–1914, New York, 1968, p. 16.

7. In June, 1917, Théâtre Art et Action presented an evening of simultaneous poetry including works by Barzun, Divoire, and Voirol.

8. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, Chicago, 1961, p. 315.

9. The Dadas were not the first to write “phonic poetry.” Abstract poetry using sound and nonsense words goes back to the medieval period where in the “comptines” of French folk poetry one can find such lines as “Am-stram-gram el pic et pic et colegram” which is vaguely equivalent to “eeenymeeny-miney-mo.” Raoul Hausmann in his Courrier Dada points to the “inner language” of The Prophetess of Prevost, a book published by Justinus Kerner in 1840, which included a sentence like “Clemor oona in diu aswinor.” Jonathan Swift in the third and fourth books of Gulliver’s Travels transcribes the speech of the Laputians and the horses in the land of the Yahoos. and Christian Morgenstern, a turn-of-the-century writer of “metaphysical nonsense”—whose verse was read at the Cabaret Voltaire, invented his own form of “nonsense language” based on the idea of phonetic poetry.

10. Though there were women “Dadas” (notably Emmy Hennings and Sophie Taeuber-Arpl, their roles in performance seem to have been peripheral. Hennings appears in Janco’s Cabaret Voltaire attempting “a split,” and Sophie Taeuber’s Dada puppets are documented in photographs. We sorely lack, however, the driving personal recollections of these women (those of Hennings are largely concerned with Ball) to help us reconstruct their work in Zurich.