The Birth of Dada
Unreason reigned supreme in Zurich on 5 February 1916 as Dada made its debut at the Cabaret Voltaire.
By February 1916 Lenin was staying in a shabby quarter of Zurich. He lived next to a butcher’s on Spiegelgasse, where he ate horsemeat and dreamt of revolution.
The same month another revolution began in the back room of a bar up the street. It was called the Cabaret Voltaire. The man behind it was Hugo Ball, a German poet. Ball needed money. He persuaded the bar’s owner that a literary cabaret would increase his sales of beer and sausages. Ball also wanted an aesthetically ecumenical art – international, polyglot, ‘incessantly lively, new and naive’. Music, poems, and songs – new, old, improvised – changed every day. Each performer, the artist Hans Richter recalled, ‘played his instrument, i.e. himself, passionately’. The result, another participant, Jean Arp, said, was ‘total pandemonium’.
Unreason was the reason. ‘We have to lose ourselves if we want to find ourselves’, Ball said. It was iconoclasm, a revolt against death, the Great War’s industrial slaughter. ‘We … were seeking an art’, Arp said, ‘to cure the madness of the age.’
It became known as Dada. Why? Memories differed. Some said it came from hearing Tristan Tzara chattering in Romanian with a friend, their conversation excitedly punctuated with ‘yes, yes’ – ‘da, da’.