Dada theatre

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In February 1916, as WW1 raged on, Dadaism was invented in Zurich by a German refugee, the poet Hugo Ball, and his companion, Emmy Hennings. They were soon joined by other skillful artists who had moved to Zurich to escape the war: the Romanian poet Tritan Tzara and the German poet Richard Hulsenbeck, the Romanian painters marcel Janco and Arthur Segal, the German painters Hans Richter and Christian Shad and a dance Sophie Taeuber. All of the painters were still using figuration when they came to Dada in 1916, and the general tendency of their works was quite Expressionistic. The group got together regularly in a tavern on the speiglegasse. The Dadaists transformed this tavern into what is now called the Cabaret Voltaire. This was the place where the members sought to ridicule the culture of their time through deliberately absurd performances, poetry, and visual art. Dadaists embraced the extraordinary, the irrational, and the contradictory largely in reaction to the brutality of World War I. Their work was driven in part by a belief that deep-seated European values, nationalism, militarism, and even the long tradition of rational philosophy-were implicated in the horrors of the war. This art