Tristan Tzara (1896–1963)

Abstract

‘The theatre. Since it still remains attached to a romantic imitation of life, to an illogical fiction, let us give it all the natural vigor it had to begin with — let it be amusement or poetry,’ wrote Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dada and author of The Gas Heart.1 A movement designed to destroy the values and standards of European bourgeois society, Dada, as conveyed in Tzara’s First Manifesto (1916), represented negation, a rebellion against the political, economic, and social systems believed to be responsible for the ‘outrage’ that was World War I. Dada also rejected all forms of accepted art, advocating anti-representationalism, anti-literary procedures, anti-logical sequences and patterns of thought, anti-syntactical structures and semantic valuations. When summing up his movement, Tzara wrote: ‘Dada signifies nothing’. He then set down the following equations: ‘order=disorder; I=non I; affirmation=negation; if each one says the contrary it’s because he is right.’2