Academic literature on the topic 'Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich, Switzerland)'

The photograph of Hugo Ball, dressed in cardboard costume and conical hat, reciting the sound poem Karawane at a Cabaret Voltaire soirée, before being carried off stage in quasi-religious paroxysm, has achieved iconic status in the history of Dada. It is a-if not the-quintessential image of Zurich Dada. Ball's image, reproduced countless times, embodies and mythologizes the Dada cabaret and its innovation of sound poetry. It is scarcely surprising that the photograph is treasured, granting as it does a glimpse into Dada performances that have become infamous but remain irretrievable.

AbstractChance encounters, some several years apart, form the basis of this article between 2 librarians and an artist, all 3 considering the process of decolonizing libraries within the wider context of colonial legacies in the societies in which they were born and in which they now live. The librarians Regina Vogel and Erica Foden-Lenahan have been friends and colleagues for many years, and their personal conversations over the years have often involved discussions of equality and injustice. The overlap in their professional interests led to this article proposal. A serendipitous meeting between Vogel and decolonial artist and curator Nistiman Erdede at an event2 organized by Abendschule Import in co-operation with the famous Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and later when he visited the Kunsthalle Basel where Vogel is the librarian, changed the original direction of the article, but presented an opportunity for a 3-way discussion of decolonization in the context of a Swiss and a German art library and a refugee artist's experience. The Covid-19 border and workplace lockdowns necessitated that some of these encounters happened virtually.

In 1916, a group of ambitious artists set out to dismantle traditional art and its accompanied bourgeois culture. Living in Zurich, these artists—among them the Romanians Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara, and the Germans Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball—formulated the new Dada movement that would awaken new artistic and literary forms through a fusion of sound, theater, and abstract art. With absurd performances at Cabaret Voltaire, they mocked rationality, morality, and beauty. Within the Dada movement in Zurich, I would like to focus on the artists whose Romanian and Jewish heritage played a central role in Cabaret Voltaire and other Dada related events. Art historical scholarship on Dada minimized this heritage in order to situate Dada within the Western avant-garde canon. However, I argue that the five young Romanians who were present on the first night of Cabaret Voltaire on February 5, 1916 brought with them from their home country certain Jewish and Romanian folk traditions, which helped form Dada’s acclaimed reputation. The five Romanians—Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and his brothers Georges Janco and Jules Janco, and Arthur Segal—moved to Zurich either to escape military conscription or to continue their college studies. By the start of the twentieth-century, Romania’s intellectual scene was already a transcultural venture, with writers and artists studying and exhibiting in countries like France and Germany. Yet, Zurich’s international climate of émigrés from all over Europe allowed the young Romanians to fully expand beyond nationalistic confines and collaborate together with other exiled intellectuals. Tom Sandqvist’s book Dada East from 2007 is the most recent and most comprehensive study of the Romanian aspect of Dada. Sandqvist traces Janco’s and Tzara’s prolific, pre-Dada time in Bucharest, along with the folk and Jewish sources that Sandqvist claims influenced their Dada performances. For instance, Tzara’s simultaneous poems, which he performed at Cabaret Voltaire, may derive from nineteenth century Jewish theater in Romania and from Hasidic song rituals. Moreover, the Dada performances with grotesque masks created by Janco relate to the colinde festival in Romania’s peasant folk culture. In my paper, I aim to analyze Sandqvist’s claim and answer the following questions: to what extent did Janco and Tzara incorporate the colinde festival and Jewish theater and ritual? Was their Jewish identity more important to them than their Romanian identity? And, lastly, how did they carry Dada back to Romania after the war ended and the Dadaists in Zurich moved on to other cities?

Abstract On 23 January 1920 Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Philippe Soupault-directors of the new avant-garde review Littérature hosted an event to honour the arrival in Paris of Tristan Tzara, the Romanian Jew who, four years earlier, had helped to found Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and who was now, for the moment, the uncontested leader of the movement.

In ‘Marionettes Unmasked’, King Ubu is analysed as a masquerade and architectural construction. Jarry’s oversized body mask is distinguished from the art of the puppet and from Edward Gordon Craig’s Übermarionette. The masquerading actor in movement is situated and theorised, with consideration of Heinrich von Kleist’s commentary, and analyses from Schumacher, States and Taxidou. The chapter also includes thoughts on the performances of Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman and Sadda Yakko. Head and body masks created by Marcel Janco and Rudolf Laban and presented at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich or at the Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland contribute to the discussion on disguise and camouflage in the era of Dada and Cubism. Masquerading and ‘Pirouettes on Eastern Fronts’ extend modernist responses to the Great War to Germany, Romania and Russia while citing the work of sculptors and other visual artists like Ernst Barlach, Constantin Brancuşi, Emmy Hennings and Käthe Kollwitz. Commedia dell’arte treatments in ‘Pierrot and Harlequin Disguised’ feature Picasso images and others created by Heinrick Campendonk, André Derain, Juan Gris and August Macke. Arnold Schönberg’s texts, images and music further complicate the role of Pierrot from Viennese point of view.