Soiree Dada: Goat Pushing Clown
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Like the scraggly band of caustic performers who’ll be thrashing about in WNEP’s tiny, amenity-free theater for the next month, the original dadaists huddled together in a cramped space during a time of war. On February 5, 1916, Hugo Ball, a young German conscientious objector who’d made his way to Zurich with forged papers and an assumed name, rented out a bar from a retired Dutch sailor and inaugurated a nightly performance melee dubbed Cabaret Voltaire. Joining him were German cabaret star Emmy Hennings, Romanian sculptor Marcel Janco, French painter Jean Arp, Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, and German medical student Richard Hulsenbeck. All had come to neutral Switzerland because they wanted nothing to do with the irrational slaughter of the Great War. Before packed houses, they attacked every bourgeois notion of taste and decorum: reciting nonsense “sound poems” while decked out in cardboard tubing, dancing to the accompaniment of banging tin cans and dog howls, shouting three or four poems simultaneously at the top of their lungs. Their assault on aesthetic norms included regular attacks on the audience. As Hulsenbeck said, “We did not neglect from time to time to tell the fat and utterly uncomprehending Zurich philistines that we regarded them as pigs.”
Dada was Europe’s first and perhaps only true anti-art movement, born out of the belief that all art created in their murderous Western societies–and even the artistic impulse–was tainted with blood. Everything in society had to be opposed, including the movement itself; as Tzara famously wrote, “True dadas are against Dada.” Tzara also admitted that although his movement appeared avant-garde it was “not at all modern”; it was instead aligned with the deep strain of literary nihilism that runs from Aristophanes to Jarry, “more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference.”
For all the nonsensical and seemingly whimsical elements, Goat Pushing Clown is a tremendously dark piece. It’s as if we’re witnessing the manic episode of someone with unmedicated bipolar disorder. Like the original dadaists, these jangled performers seem acutely aware of the chasm of nihilism that gapes beneath their feet. But rather than run from it, they’re content to plummet into its depths while singing nonsense songs. I got the disturbing sense that their personae didn’t give a fuck about anything, including their audience–like any true Dada event, this one is often opaque and unpleasant. Witnessing such unapologetic nihilism can be sobering, especially at a time when an invitation to give up on society is tempting.
