Ball: (Stepping forward, dressed in black) Behind the mask of nationalism, morality, honor, rationalism, and idealized art lies the reality of imperialism and a scramble for world markets that leaves millions of people slaughtered in the name of profits. (Audience claps. Ball walks around the room shaking hands.)

Narrator 1: Two years after the start of the war, Ball emigrates from Germany to the neutral territory of Zurich, Switzerland. In 1916, in the Cafe Voltaire, under his inspiration, Dada is born. From the beginning Dada is an international European movement of artists, many the sons and daughters of that same middle class that is profiting from the new imperialism. (As each person is named, he/she can do some characteristic gesture or movement) Sophie Taeuber, textile artist and dancer; the Rumanian architect and poet, Marcel Janco; Emmy Hennings, singer; Louis Aragon, French poet and founder of surrealism; German expressionist, Hans Richter; French painter, Marcel Duchamp; the American photographer Man Ray; George Grosz, German painter and caricaturist; French composer Erik Satie; the Swiss painter Paul Klee; Wassily Kandinsky, Russian painter, poet, and mystic; Jean Arp, German poet and painter; Kurt Schwitters, well-known collage artist, and others.

Arp: We are all more than just war resisters. We are defectors from the ideology of European civilization. Our thinking is that if we paint and sing and dance and write poems that the butchery of war and the humiliation of national greed will be cleansed from us.

Janco: We are furious with Western values that permit the suffering and humiliation of the people around us.

Narrator #1: The influence of Dada will spread to almost every major country in Europe. Music, poetry, dance, photography, painting, and sculpture will be influenced by it. But by the mid-twenties, it will evolve into Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Surrealism.

Richter: (Soft music starts here and builds as script moves towards Tzara’s speech) We clear the path for a twentieth century art. We are making a political statement in the face of growing chaos.

Ball: Every word we utter at the Cafe Voltaire says that we are intent on keeping our self-respect in the face of stagnation, humiliation, and death.

Narrator #2: Now, for a moment, imagine yourself at the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. The day is July 14, Bastille Day. The small crowded audience doesn’t know what to expect. Without warning, Tristan Tzara, the Rumanian poet, stands up on a chair and, reading from a scroll, yells out over the noise of the patrons his most recent manifesto:

Tzara: I smash drawers, those of the brain and those of social organization: Everywhere to demoralize, to hurl the hand from heaven to hell, the eyes from hell to heaven, to set up once more, in the imagination of every individual, the fecund wheel of the world circus.

Narrator #2: Tzara finishes and ambles back to his table, having sent his words out over the shocked faces in the cafe. Several performers now appear on the far stage, dressed in outlandish costumes. They start to recite simultaneously to the accompaniment of tom-toms, cow bells, and blows on the table. Jean Arp, poet and painter, steps forth from the troupe and while it continues its cacophony, he proceeds to render “The Guest Expulsed.” (Start noise at word Arp, and then fade out at end of next to last stanza.)

“The Guest Expulsed” 

Their rubber hammer strikes the sea 
Down the black general so brave. 
With silken braid they deck him out 
As fifth wheel on the common grave. 

All striped in yellow with the tides 
They decorate his firmament. 
The epaulettes they then construct 
Of June July and wet cement. 

With many limbs the portrait group 
They lift on to the Dadadado; 
They nail their A B seizures up; 
Who numbers the compartments? They do. 

They dye themselves with blue-bag then 
And go as rivers from the land, 
With candied fruit along the stream, 
An Oriflamme in every hand. 

Narrator #2: Imagine the total effect of the background noise as a battle of the human voice against mechanistic forces. Moreover, the din from the performers is matched by the din of color, noise and movement from the small jam-packed room. Brightly colored flags and collages vibrate on the walls and from the ceiling. A fight breaks out near the door. The audience, a motley of local merchants, tourists, artists, students, international spies and secret police, registers delight and dismay simultaneously. On this gala evening Lenin strolls over from his residence in exile, #12 Spiegelgasse, diagonally across the street, puzzling over this new phenomenon spawned by the bourgeoisie.

Finally, the highpoint of the evening: Hugo Ball is carried up onto the stage to recite for the first time his abstract poem: “O gadji beri bimba.”

Ball: I was surrounded by large African masks and tom-toms, and accompanied by a small chorus. I wore a special costume designed by Danco and myself. My legs were encased in a tight-fitting cylindrical pillar of shiny blue cardboard, which reached to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk. Above this I wore a huge cardboard coat collar, scarlet inside and gold outside, which was fastened at the neck in such a way that I could flap it like a pair of wings by moving my elbows. I also wore a high, cylindrical, blue and white striped witch-doctor’s hat. (A quiet chanting begins) My intention is to present a poem without language tainted by the lies of journalism and without imagery tainted by human beings and their things. (The chanting stops) The audience roars with laughter as I become more and more solemn. My childhood years attending Mass come back to me.

Small Chorus: (Chanting begins again, with Ball’s voice predominating. The volume begins soft and leads to a crescendo, and then softens again.)

Narrator #1: (Time correctly to get a laugh) And so forth. But Ball could be tender and moving too. In fact, Ball spends his later life as a devout Catholic worker among the poor peasants of Ticino, and was remembered with love for his goodness.

Ball:

I had no love for the death’s-head hussars, 
Nor for the mortars with the girls’ names on them. 
And when at last the glorious days arrived, 
I unobtrusively went on my way. 

Narrator #1: (Ball sits in the audience.) The idealized portrait, the stock in trade of middle class academic art, gives way to a new reality. Emmy Hennings, one of a handful of women connected with the Cafe Voltaire, observes the dingy of life of the streets in her song-poem “After the Cabaret.”

Hennings: (In a thin, annoying voice)

I go home in the morning light. 
The clock strikes five, the sky grows pale, 
A light still burns in the hotel; 
The cabaret shuts for the night. 
In a corner children hide. 
To the market farmers ride, 
Silently churchward go the old. 
Bells ring in the silent air, 
And a whore with tousled hair 
Still wanders, sleepless and cold. 

Narrator #1: Desiring to incorporate art into everyday life, Tristan Tzara employs the principle of pure chance. His formula for a poem?

Tzara: (Standing front and off center)

Take a newspaper. 
Take some scissors. 
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem. 
Cut out the article. 
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. 
Shake gently. 
Next take out each cutting one after the other. 
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. 
The poem will resemble you. 
And there you are--an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd. 

Narrator #2: Although this refined technique itself has a rather limited life span, it opens new dimensions in art: free association, spontaneity and playfulness, fragmentary thought, and the unexpected imagery of the subconscious. In the prose poem “Filatures de Junques” or “Pieces of Junk,” from his book of poems entitled Anti-Head, Tzara displays the results of one such experiment:

Tzara:

Crystal of the most beautiful pleasures, bitterness with the tired hair (moldy.) Crystal with haggard eyes, with the haggard hair of wind, bitterness with the beatings of a rusted insect, its drum. Crystal of hearts, of temples and of sounds, bitterness rusts the drum of insects. Insect crystal with haggard eyes, the bitterness with the rumpled hair rusts the bitterness with haggard eyes of our most beautiful desires of the heart, temple and noise. Crystal with the most beautiful desires, bitterness rusts hearts, temples, and noises. Haggard crystal, bitterness rusts the most beautiful insect, the angel. Crystal of love and bitterness, the white, the angel, and the precision.

Narrator #2: But Tzara, too, in the more controlled mood of a craftsman, can use the results of this experimentation in a more comprehensible way, treating an old reality in a new manner, as in his poem “Evening.”

Tzara:

Fishers return with stars for water; 
They share bread with the poor, string necklaces with the blind; 
Emperors go out into parks ‘til that hour which 
resembles the bitterness of etchings; 
Servants bathe the hunting dogs; the light puts on 
gloves. 
Close the window, therefore. 
Light quits the room as the pit the apricot; 
as the priest, the church. 
Dear God, make the wool soft for plaintive lovers, 
paint little birds in ink and renew the image on the moon. 
Let us go catch scarabs to shut them in a box, 
Let us go to the brook to make jugs of clay. 
Let us go to embrace at the fountain, 
Let us go to the park until the cock sings and the town is scandalized; 
or to the granary, the hay pricks, we hear the cows low, then they remember the young. 
Let us go. 

Narrator #1: The Dada poets at their most critical and public best achieve a delicate balance between diverse moods and tones of voice, between modes of being and subject matter: the rational and the irrational, tenderness and sarcasm, wistfulness and political polemic, private and public. Yes, as bizarre as they sometimes sound, they are very concerned about the relationship between art and society. Art is not an end in itself, but an agent of social criticism and cultural self-awareness. The urgency was felt so strongly that the question “have we anything to eat?” becomes an ethical question.

Narrator #2: The Dadaist sense of foreboding about the future proves to be correct: in 1917, Lenin returns to Russia to engineer the first socialist revolution, which, upon his death in 1924, turns into a one-man dictatorship under his bloody successor Josef Stalin. In 1918, the hostilities of World War I end. Eight million soldiers, dead. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, divides up Germany's overseas empire among the victorious European nations. The instability brought by defeat paves the way for internal revolts of both the left and the right, propelling into the public eye in 1923, one Adolph Hitler, who ten years later establishes a Nazi dictatorship. The seeds of fascism have taken root in Italy and Spain as well. About this same time, across the world in Britain's largest colony, Mohandas Ghandi assumes the leadership of the Indian National Congress: the counter-movement of Third World peoples towards national self-determination begins. By the time the Dada movement is transformed into surrealism in 1925, the stage has been set for the next phase of the troubled twentieth century.

Narrator #1: For many reasons, America remains in self-centered isolation throughout the Twenties and the Thirties; and so the legacy of Dada does not become visible in America until the 1960’s. Of the original Dadaists only one was American - Man Ray, the photographer, but the first American poet to be influenced by Dada (via its potent offspring Surrealism) is Kenneth Patchen.

Ball: Although the spirit of DADA will be with us forever, forever changing with the times, we would like you to understand what it means for us now. (What follows should be read firmly, yet slowly.)

Arp: DADA is an arts movement that takes place between an imperialist world war and the emergence of the twentieth century totalitarian state.

Hennings: DADA is also a spirit: the spirit of art free to formulate itself and never subservient to ideology.

Tzara: The interplay of opposites; the clash of parallel lines; the union of reason and feeling; of body and mind; of the personal and the political; of the rational and the irrational - all DADA.

Janco: The spirit of political protest of the artist against the overwhelming forces of dehumanization in the twentieth century - DADA

Richter: The spirit of negation containing the seeds of the future -

Each one: DADA DADA DADA DADA DADA DADA

Together: The spirit of DADA is the affirmation of life.

Narrators: (stepping out on stage) Thank you very much. We deserve it! (Lots of applause, then everyone immediately starts mingling and guzzling wine.)

An Audience Member: (Stands up, swaying, and shouts) Who made it up - “Dada”?

(Annoyed voices follow. The narrators try to hush everyone. Against the general noise, the poets themselves try to sort things out.)

Ball: (Seriously) On April 18th, I proposed to Tzara that we call our magazine Dada.

Tzara: (With gusto) No. No. Janco and I - we Rumanians named it. Da. Da. Yes. Yes. We said it first.

Narrators: (Trying to break in) Gentlemen! Gentlemen!

Another Voice from the Floor: (probably a Dr. Huelsenbeck) No. No. Ball and I picked it out at random in a German- French dictionary. We were trying to find a stage name for one of the singers.

Arp: (Steps forward and speaks in an authoritative tone) Let me settle this. I hereby declare that Tzara invented the word Dada on 6th February 1916, at 6 p.m. I was there with my 12 children when Tzara first uttered the word... it happened in the Cafe de la Terrasse in Zurich, and I was wearing a brioche in my left nostril. (Silence)

Narrator #2: (Pauses. Looks at everyone. Makes a “cut” sign with his hands. Loud mutterings begin.) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Motions for applause to begin again. Brief thank-you nods. Then everyone, seeing that a fight is not breaking out, immediately lapses again into social mode - smoking, chatting, flirting, and guzzling wine. The two narrators huddle together, talking.)

Narrator #1: Does Dada actually show up in the everyday lives of these crazy artists?

Narrator #2: Yes. Believe it. Kurt Schwitters, who isn’t here this evening, told me about the time he went to introduce himself to George Grosz, a painter and a known malcontent. He rang Grosz’s doorbell. After a few long minutes, Grosz answered the door. Schwitters introduced himself and waited for Grosz to do the same. But Grosz replied, “I am not Grosz,” and slammed the door. Schwitters, not be outdone, rang the bell a second time, and waited for Grosz to answer the door again. The door opened. “I am not Schwitters,” Schwitters said and turned around and left.

Narrator #1: Did they ever meet again?

Narrator #2: No. That was their first and last meeting.

(Both laugh, turn around, pick up a drink, and mingle with the cafe patrons.)

The End

My two sources are: (1) Dada Art and Anti-Art, by Hans Richter, Copyright 1964, DuMont Schauberg, Cologne, Germany. The original edition was republished by Thames and Hudson Ltd., London (1965 and1997), and New York (1985) and was translated from the German by David Britt; and (2) Dada: Monograph of a Movement, edited by Willy Verkauf, Teufen, 1957. I also wish to acknowledge with many thanks Mr. Hans Coudenhove of Thames and Hudson who has granted me permission to use these sources.