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The Relentless Taskmaster That is Anti-Art

Posted by DCA Theater on November 20, 2008 in July-December 2008 Season, SOIREÉ DADA: SCHMÜCKT DER HALLEN

Written by Don Hall

The founders of DADA flamed out in only a couple of years after beginning the movement. There was plenty of blame thrown around at the time: infighting for credit, positioning individuals to become THE voice of DADA, a sense of purposelessness when the Great War did not end the world and a return to, at least temporarily, international common sense all had a hand in fracturing that group.

I have another log to throw on that fire.

Perhaps they just got tired.

As we gear up for our sixth soireé in twelve years, one thing among the many personal reactions that shines through is that DADA is hard. I’m not complaining, mind you. I can’t think of anything I find more inspiring or darkly wondrous than the act of furiously trying to communicate ideas through the convoluted prism of nonsense and dissonant imagery, filled with anger and amazement and sarcasm. I loves me some DADA.

No. Not complaining.

But DADA is a real backbreaker to navigate.

The cast of Soireé DADA: Schmuck die Hallen, like the casts of the five soireé’s before, have bent over backwards to accomplish the artistically impossible and are like watching a strange act of unnatural nature. They injure themselves to create the moments I orchestrate for them. They bruise themselves in the Abandon All Restraint approach to whisper, bang, scream, sing, and fling themselves across the stage like insane ragdolls intent to squeeze out every last drop of creative energy they have.

And then they go to work and live their days and come back at night to do it all over again.

I stand in amazement every time I see it happen.

I would claim that of all performance media, of all theatrical genres, DADA is the most taxing and most difficult. Give me a script that makes sense and the intent is clear. Give me a poem comprised of the “words” sipita, CANK, rumlumlum, and challenge me to make those words communicate my distrust of government officials while wearing clown white and a vaudeville suit and the gauntlet has been thrown. I will likely never solve the problem and will bust my a** trying to for a long time.

There are those who question the very DADA-ness of what we do and to those who think they have a bead on what DADA is I say:

DADA ist wie DADA.
DADA is what DADA does.

DADA is a perspective on the world. DADA questions every assumption and standard practice. DADA breaks the rules of conventionality to crack them open and ask “Why?” and to suggest, through action, as many alternatives as the mind can conceive. And as soon as any of us (myself included) believes he has “nailed DADA down” and is “in the know,” DADA changes and spits its venom in his face.

Would the founders of DADA dig what we do? Not a chance.

And I would stand in the street with Tristan Tzara and we would brawl like drunken Irishmen to determine who was right.

Part of his hatred of WNEP DADA would be the whiteface - we have reasons, Tristan.
Part of his hatred of WNEP DADA would be the elements of vaudeville - but this is specifically American DADA, so we gots to have some vaudevilles.
Part of his hatred of this specific WNEP DADA Soiree will be a less angry, less dissatisfied, more hopeful tonality. We have reasons for that, too.

At the end of the fistfight, I would explain to Tzara (while choking him with my forearm) that for DADA to be of any use to those of us in the 21st Century, it has to be used and not revered for it’s past. It has to be updated, improved upon, or at least dusted off and fired up every now and again. WNEP Theater used to have a sign over our door. It said “Nothing is Sacred. Not Even You.”

Write that on a piece of newsprint and stuff that up your dead a**, Tzara.