Dada and Surrealism

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Dada and Surrealism
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DADA

• Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that
  began in Zurich Switzerland during the First
  World War and peaked from 1916 to 1922.
• The movement involved visual arts , poetry,
  literature, art manifestoes, theater and graphic
  design. The movement follows anti-war politics
  through rejection of the prevailing standards in
  art through anti-art cultural work.
• Dada was an informal international movement, with
  participants in Europe and North America. The
  beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of
  World War I. For many participants, the movement
  was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist
  and colonist interests which many Dadaists
  believed were the root cause of the war, and
  against the cultural and intellectual conformity
  in art and more broadly in society that
  corresponded to the war.
• According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it
  was anti-art." For everything that art stood
  for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where
  art was concerned with traditional aesthetics,
  Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to
  sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.
  Through their rejection of traditional culture
  and aesthetics the Dadaists hoped to destroy
  traditional culture and aesthetics.

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DADA (contd)

• Dada movement was born in neutral Switzerland in
  1916 from group of artist who wanted to show
  their anti-war position. Hugo Ball, Emmy
  Henning, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco
  , Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Tauber along with
  others immigrants living in Switzerland during
  the war created Dada movement. They were
  performing in Cabaret Voltaire. After the end of
  the war these artist came back in their countries
  spreading Dada outside Switzerland.
• In the cities pf Berlin , Cologne , Paris ,
  Zurich Dadaists gathered together maintained
  Dada style of art. Groups as well published
  magazines and works oriented in the movement
  style. With greater importance and magnitude were
  cities of Zurich and New York, to lessen degree
  Berlin. However Dada face was not the same in
  each of these place, sometimes there were
  differences. European Dada and New York Dada were
  not the same. New York Dada lacked the
  disillusionment of European Dada and was instead
  driven by a sense of irony and humor. Moreover
  Dada in Berlin was used in political and social
  way and there artist were not so anti-art.

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Dada and Theatre

• Tristan Tzara - was an avant-garde poet,
  essayist and performance-artist. Also active as a
  journalist, playwright, literary and art critic,
  composer and film director. He created several
  plays , some of them are
• The Gas Heart use peculiar verbal strategy and
  is build on a dialogue between characters called
  Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow. They
  seem unwilling to actually communicate to each
  other and their reliance on proverbs and
  idiotisms willingly creates confusion between
  metaphorical and literal speech. The play ends
  with a dance performance that recalls similar
  devices used by the proto Dadaist Alfred Jarry.
• Handkerchief of Clouds - the play was written in
  1924 and explores the relation between perception
  , subconscious and memory. Largely through
  exchanges between commentators who act as third
  parties, the text presents the tribulations of
  a love triangle (a poet, a bored woman, and her
  banker husband, whose character traits borrow the
  clichés of conventional drama), and in part
  reproduces settings and lines from Hamlet.Tzara
  mocks classical theater, which demands from
  characters to be inspiring, believable, and to
  function as a whole Handkerchief of
  Cloudsrequires actors in the role of commentators
  to address each other by their real names,and
  their lines include dismissive comments on the
  play itself, while the protagonist, who in the
  end dies, is not assigned any name.

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Founders of Dada

• Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp,
  Marcel Janco and Sophie Tauber-Arp.

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Dada apart from theatre
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Cabaret Voltaire
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Surrealism

• Surrealism is cultural movement that began
  in early 1920s. Surrealist works feature the
  element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions
  and absurd logic. Surrealist artists and writers
  regard their work as an expression of the
  philosophical movement first and foremost, with
  the works being an artifact.
• Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities
  of World War I and the most important center of
  the movement was Paris. From the 1920s on, the
  movement spread around the globe, eventually
  affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and
  music, of many countries and languages, as well
  as political thought and practice, and philosophy
  and social theory. Leading figure in Surrealism
  movement was Andre Breton. Under Breton's
  direction, surrealism became a European movement
  that influenced all domains of art, and called
  into question the origin of human understanding
  and human perceptions of things and events.

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Surrealism

• In The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques),
  a collaboration with Soupault, he put the
  principle of automatic writing into practice. He
  published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and
  was editor of La Revolution Surrealist from 1924.
  A group coalesced around him Philippe
  Sopault,Louis Aragon,Paul Eluard, and others

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Surrealism and Theatre

• Surrealist theater depicts the subconscious
  experience, moody tone and disjointed structure,
  sometimes imposing a unifying idea Surrealists
  reject Western Theater traditions. Antonin Arnaud
  for example thought theater should be mystical
  and religious experience. Endeavouring to create
  a new theatrical form that would be immediate and
  direct, linking the unconscious minds of
  performers and spectators, a sort of ritual
  event, Artaud created the Theater of Cruelty
  where emotions, feelings, and the metaphysical
  were expressed not through text or dialogue but
  physically, creating a mythological, archetypal,
  allegorical vision, closely related to the world
  of dreams. These sentiment lead to creation of
  the Theater of Absurd .

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Theater of Cruelty

• Theater of Cruelty is concept of Antonin Arnaud.
  According to him the theater is not possible
  without cruelty as basis and cruelty have to be
  the root of every spectacle. The term cruelty
  does not mean to use sadism or causing pain but
  rather a violent, physical determination to
  shatter the false reality which, he said, "lies
  like a shroud over our percept perceptions.
  Cruelty not in a sense of being violent, but the
  cruelty it takes for actors to completely strip
  away their masks and show an audience a truth
  that they do not want to see. He believed that
  text had been a tyrant over meaning, and
  advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a
  unique language that lay halfway between thought
  and gesture. Artaud described the spiritual in
  physical terms, and believed that all expression
  is physical expression in space.

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Theater of Absurd

• Though the label "Theatre of the Absurd" covers
  a wide variety of playwrights with differing
  styles, they do have some common stylistic
  precursors.The mode of most absurd plays is
  tragicomedy similarly to first play writer who
  used tragicomedy- William Shakespeare. Though
  layered with a significant amount of tragedy, the
  Theatre of Absurd echoes other great forms of
  comedic performance from Commedia dell arte to
  Vaudeville. As an experimental form of theatre,
  Theatre of the Absurd employs techniques borrowed
  from earlier innovators. Writers and techniques
  frequently mentioned in relation to the Theatre
  of the Absurd include the 19th century nonsense
  poets, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.
• Theatre of Absurd. Some of the famous play
  writers are Jean Genet, Jean Tardieu, Boris
  Vien and others

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Surrealism apart from theatre
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THE END

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