Dadaism

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Hollandische 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.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Dawn Ades No other episodes
  Emeritus Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex
• Ruth Hemus No other episodes
  Professor of French and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London
• Stephen Forcer No other episodes
  Professor of French at the University of Glasgow

Reading list

• The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology
  Dawn Ades (ed.) (Tate Publishing, 2006) Google Books →
• Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary
  Hugo Ball (trans. Ann Raimes and ed. John Elderfield) (University of California Press, 1996) Google Books →
• Dada as Text, Thought and Theory
  Stephen Forcer (Legenda, 2015) Google Books →
• Dada's Women
  Ruth Hemus (Yale University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction
  David Hopkins (Oxford University Press, 2004) Google Books →
• Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century
  Jed Rasula (Basic Books, 2015) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m002sr43

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002sr43

Auto-category: 709.04 (Art movements of the 20th century)