Zurich Dada and Dance: Formative Ferment

Abstract

Zurich Dada had a profound impact on twentieth-century dance, bringing new possibilities to a rapidly changing field. The Dadaist performance ideas were mainly drawn from pre-World War I artistic movements-Futurism, Expressionism and Cubism. Coming together during World War I in Zurich, the artists and writers who made up the group found themselves loosely unified in a desire to destroy traditional forms of expression and build a society based on a purer vision encompassed in new artistic forms. The intensity of time and place-a small city far from the immediate battles of the warallowed for an exchange of ideas that reactivated, integrated and reshaped the pre-World War I manifestoes and experiments of the various art movements. Dada became a movement in February 1916, when several artists and writers opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where they presented lectures, readings, songs, experiments with masks, simultaneous and sound poems, movement experiments and abstract dances. When Cabaret Voltaire closed in June 1916, the Dadaists found another platform for their activities-the Galerie Dada, which opened March 1917 and closed eleven weeks later. Dada activities continued but began to diminish and change. A nihilist impulse was becoming the strongest force in the group. In addition, the war was coming to a close and the leaders of the group began to leave Zurich. By 1919, Zurich Dada essentially no longer existed, but Dada had come alive with new mutations, primarily in Paris and Germany. The dance activity that was part of Zurich Dada at both Cabaret Voltaire and Galerie Dada had two aspects. One was the movement exploration that took place as a component of the experiments with sounds, words and masks. The other aspect of the dance activity consisted of the movement ideas presented in more formal dance compositions, performed and choreographed by women studying with Rudolf Laban, who had opened a school in Zurich in 1915. The Zurich Dada aesthetic was formulated primarily by the activities of seven individuals, all with different artistic

Performing <i>with</i> the Masquerade: Towards a Corporeal Reconstitution of Sophie Taeuber’s Dada Performances

“…PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 4 (2) (2019) 1 Since the picture of Taeuber dancing was left without date and location, art historians have been assuming that her performance took place either in Cabaret Voltaire in 1916(e.g., Foster 2003and Bargues 2017 or in Galerie Dada in 1917 (e.g., Prevots 1985 andMair 2013), sometimes mentioning both dates as a reference (Andrew 2014) as we also do in this contribution: 1916/17.…”

“…2 Some historians attribute the mask to Marcel Janco (Foster 2003, Hemus 2007, Burkhalter 2014, while other scholars such as Prevots (1985) and fellow Dadaists (Tzara) attributed it to Hans Arp. In this article, we will build on the assumption that Janco produced the mask (Hemus 2007, 93 andBurkhalter 2014, 228).…”