III.

Cabaret Voltaire

Dadaism was launched in earnest in February 1916 when Hugo Ball, a German poet and musician, and his wife, performer Emmy Hennings, opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Switzerland. As a neutral country, Switzerland was a haven for opponents to the war, and from the beginning the Cabaret attracted an international group of artists and intellectuals. They soon rallied under the banner of dada, a term whose origin remains in dispute. German writer (and later psychologist) Richard Huelsenbeck claimed that he and Ball chose it as a stage name for a female dancer in the Cabaret; but Romanian-born French poet Tristan Tzara, who became dada's chief promoter, also claimed authorship. In any case, the name dada, French for “rocking horse”, won general support for its ambiguity and evident inanity. In a manifesto of 1918, Tzara proclaimed, “DADA MEANS NOTHING.”

Nightly events at the Cabaret Voltaire were intentionally outrageous and drew in part on performances by poets who were members of a closely related Italian art movement called futurism, which celebrated machinery, speed, and other aspects of modern life. Intelligibility was at a minimum, and costumes were often outlandish. French artist Jean Arp was an occasional participant in the Cabaret Voltaire and described one evening’s performance as 'Total pandemonium. The people around us are shouting, laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos…Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an oriental dancer. [Romanian artist Marcel] Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.' Dadaists promoted the art of children, the insane, non-Westerners, and any other people outside the accepted norms of European society.