About this episode
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the Dada artistic movement that emerged in Zurich during World War I.
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball and others gathered on a small stage, sometimes dressed in cardboard, often performing nonsense poems. This was the start of Dada, a spirit more than a movement which spread to other cities in Europe during the war. In part the Dadas (as they called themselves) were protesting against the inevitability of constant wars on the continent and in part this was an artistic experiment around the absurd; they were creating poems, songs, costumes and art that made no obvious sense, just as the war around them made no sense to the artists, designers and poets at the Cabaret Voltaire. With Dawn Ades Emeritus Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex Ruth Hemus Professor of French and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London And Stephen Forcer Professor of French at the University of Glasgow Produced by Martha Owen Reading list: Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (Tate Publishing, 2006) Hugo Ball (trans. Ann Raimes…
People in this episode
Host: Misha Glenny
Guests: Dawn Ades, Ruth Hemus, Stephen Forcer
Topics covered
- Dadaism
- artistic phenomenon
- Cabaret Voltaire
- absurdism
- protest against war
- European art movements
Keywords
- Dadaism
- Cabaret Voltaire
- art
- war
- nonsense poems
- European art
- absurdity
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of Essex, Royal Holloway, University of London, University of Glasgow
Books & works: The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, Dada as Text, Thought and Theory, Dada's Women, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction
Places: Zurich
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