The World is Screaming for Some DADA

Teaching college students about the WWI Era Anti-Art got me thinking...

In the 90s and early 00s, I was the executive Director for a nonprofit, Off Loop theater company, WNEP Theater.

WNEP stood for “What No one Else Produces” and, true to the name, we put up some bizarre shit. A long-running thread stemming from one of our founders dabbling in the genre, was a series of DADA soirées, aptly titled Soireé DADA. Yes, we knew we spelled it wrong. That was part of our gag.

I’m currently in St, George, Utah, helping out an old actor buddy of mine with his college theater classes. He’s their theater history and playwriting prof and asked if I could come in and shake them up a bit (they can’t cancel me).

In preparation to introduce and proselytize DADA to a neophyte group of kids, I realized that, in many ways, the world that spawned DADA was similar to the chaotic division and all-hell-breaking-loose at every moment we are living through today.

There are always reasons for war. Putin’s current invasion is about recreating his beloved Soviet Union superpower status. Vietnam and Korea were about fighting back against communism. WWII was a battle against the Nazis, Italy, and Japanese.

WWI was none of these. Effectively a meaningless global pissing contest between ruling cousins that enveloped most developed militaries on the planet, it was as pointless as it was horrifying. “If rationality, logic, and common understanding leads to this, then rationality, logic, and common understanding are of no use.”

Tristan Tzara and company fled to Zurich then Berlin and, in part because they were artists who could not get a foothold in the rigid and rule-heavy arts world, went about destroying everything valued artistically and using the pieces of the destruction to create something new and unfathomable.

They called it DADA and the legend holds they came up with the name by randomly opening a page of a French dictionary.

As I will tell the kids today, that was then. Those cats are long dead. DADA has been co-opted by everything from surrealism to Geico commercials to Tik Tok like a spice added for zest. “I don’t know. It tastes like…chaos?”

One of the revelations we had back in 2001 was that most DADA being performed or created in the early part of the 21st century was either the recreation of museum pieces or for commerce in bite-sized DADA nuggets. We decided that if DADA was to be relevant, we needed to take this nonsense anti-art and make it serve our need to communicate about our world at the time. Addressing the invasion of Iraq, the tenuous nature of George W. Bush’s barely elected presidency, gender politics, queer issues, systemic racism became the meat in our DADA revisionism.

It was angry. It was playful. It was almost theater as behavioral science. It was an epiphany to every artist involved as far as I recall.

2022 is a world in flux. A botched recovery from a global pandemic. Democracies across the planet in decline. A war in Europe by a Russian despot. A recent report on our climate that is, to say the very least, dire. An almost Dadaist reimagining of definitional terms rendering basic communication on racism, the biological existence of men and women, violence, and hatred.

It’s time for some DADA, baby. It’s time for some artists to not only crash the system but to then take the pieces scattered about the floor and create new systems. Not the lazy effort to replace one flawed model (capitalism) with a different flawed model (socialism/Marxism) but something completely new.

It’s time for some DADA.