The last decades of the 1800s and the first of the 1900s was a time of great artistic activity, which saw the birth of what were afterward called the avant gardes. These artistic movements all sought to break with the past and search for a new way of expression, more atoned to the modern individual. The avant gardes intercepted that sense of oppression and will to find a new way that characterised the years between these two centuries.

Dada was one of the first of these avant gardes. It was born at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich in 1916, at the peak of WWI, when the city had become an haven for artists and political dissenters trying to escape the horrors of the war, but soon it spread all over Europe.
Dada wasn’t a true ideological movement, it was far too anarchist for that. It was more a global way to understand life and arts, which were not two different things in the eyes of Dadaists, but one and the same. Dada rejected all conventional art forms and became an irrational, nonsensical way of expression. Chaos and fragmentations were essential to expression, the means with which Dadaists tried to make sense of a senseless world.

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Born in the central, more heated years of the Great War, Dada was against violence, against repression and authoritarianism. It was horrified by the absurd violence of war, the millions of deaths, the horrible disfigurations. It proclaimed that old structure of mind and creation should be abandoned because everything, absolutely everything was art, even the more inconsequential of everyday tool.
Dada wanted to be a movement without history and no future, which lived in the here and now. Alternative to the extreme, bustling with life, Dada still didn’t live long. It burned bright and quickly and soon its members were absorbed by other ways of expression or social involvement. It was still an experience that influenced all the avant gardes and entertainment forms that came after.

The Cabaret Voltaire

It is noteworthy that Dada was born in a cabaret. Hugo Ball, like so many other avant garde artists, volunteered for war when it broke out, but soon realised it was a horrible butchery rather than an occasion of heroism.. In 1916 he was discharged on ground of health and fled to Zurich, which had become a safe haven for all seeking peace. There, he founded the Cabaret Voltaire (the name of the enlightener was both a mock and an auspicious in those times of madness) and invited young artists from all over Europe to join him, for a creative confrontation on arts. They promptly answer and basically overnight the Cabaret Voltaire became on hub of arts and experimentation.
To the dismay of Zurich’s more orderly citizens, the Cabaret Voltaire would experiment with the new kind of unreason the war had created in order to develop a sanity. The shows were laud and crazy. The artists would often perform in among the audience rather than from the stage, the confériencer would insult the public, all in order to rouse a new conscience.

Dada theatre

The Dadaist wanted to produce an art that was anti-war and negated the spirit that had produced the Great War. Their shows were boisterous, an extravagant series of happenings heavily based on improvisation.
Dadaist almost never rehearsed their text. This brought on imperfection, false starts, stumbles during the show, but all this was considered part of the artistic creation, which happened in front of the public in the moment in was performed. Dadaist valued the process far more than they did the final product.
Especially the Cabaret Voltaire performances were marked by audience provocation and protest. Anything was fair game: Surprise and shock tactics, the use of bruitist elements, poetry or prose that was aggressively anti-logical, experiments with masks, costuming and dance that were radically anti-conventional. It often resulted in clamour and public denunciation until eventually the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close its premises at the end of 1916.
That’s when Dada spread all over Europe and in Berlin especially it found good soil for evolution.

Anti-theatre as it was, Dada still retained many theatrical elements. The spontaneity of improvisation, for example. The summoning forth of the ‘magical’ forces within the individual that make the creation of art even possible. Above all the desire to move their audience and cause a change, hopefully for the better, inside them.

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RESOURCES

Guide to Musical Theatre – The German Cabaret
Historical Tales About the Capitals of the 20th Century – Dadaism in Berlin. The radical opponents of the establishment and their (un)organised contradictions
Tranquil Eye – Dada Theatre
Dadart – The Dada Movement – Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, Holland

Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret. Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1993
Lisa Appignanesi, The Cabaret. Yale university Press, New Haven and London, 1975-1984
Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany. Promise and Tragedy. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2007

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