College of Arts & Humanities

Dada Dynamics: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire 1916/2024

Thinking Culture | School of Culture & Creative Arts | College of Arts & Humanities
Date: Thursday 23 May 2024
Time: 19:00 - 21:00
Venue: Jim's Bar, Queen Margaret Union
Category: Films and theatre, Social events, Student events
Website: thinkingculture.gla.ac.uk/event/dada-dynamics-caberet-voltaire/

Dada Dynamics: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire 1916/2024 is a creative response, using sound and movement improvisation, to seminal Dada performances from the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. The Dadaists, all in a state of exile, generated new forms of expression at the Cabaret (sound poems, bruitistic sonics, improvised masked dances and more) as gestures of both helplessness and defiance in the face of the devastating conflicts of their age. Exploring the improvisation at the heart of Dada and the possibilities for collaborative sonic work based on Dada’s fragments today, this evening brings Glasgow’s GIOdynamics, its founder Jer Reid (on behalf of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra), and a diverse team of performers in music and movement together with Dada expert Debbie Lewer (Senior Lecturer in History of Art). In frenzy and festivity, protest and play, lament and longing, the evening will pay homage to Dada and to the spirit of creativity vitally alive in our city today. Dada Dynamics plays with historical shards to create a fresh, unique, spontaneous and arresting soundscape for our own fractured times. The evening culminates in a contemporary interpretation of a key sonic work in Dada’s early repertoire, rarely performed today: A Nativity Play: Bruitistic, by Hugo Ball. 

Note: The performance includes a brief instance of flashing lights. 

This project is supported by Thinking Culture funding 2023-24, awarded to Deborah Lewer.

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