“Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing”: Tristan Tzara and Dada
The avant-garde poet and performance artist pioneered the Dada movement while living in WWI Zürich, as featured in Tom Stoppard’s TRAVESTIES
In Tom Stoppard’s Travesties — onstage at Lantern Theater Company September 8 through October 9, 2022 — Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara collide with British Consulate official Henry Carr in 1917 Zürich. Each character is both real and a fiction, a funhouse-mirror distortion of the real thing — in short, a travesty. One who might have enjoyed this absurdity: Tristan Tzara himself, a Dada visionary.
Tristan Tzara was born Samuel Rosenstock in 1896 Romania into a Jewish family. By 1915 he had become immersed in Symbolism, an art movement that used reference and representation to examine emotions and psychology in the artist and viewer. In Bucharest for school, the teenage Tzara and fellow young artists started a Symbolism magazine — Simbolul. Though the magazine published only six issues, it attracted several of Romania’s leading Symbolists and the partnership between Tzara and Marcel Janco would carry both of them to Zürich — and to Dada.
From a young age, Tzara developed revolutionary and anti-bourgeoise principles, which led to a break with his family and his birth name. Under the new name of Tzara — possibly a pun on either the Hebrew for “exiled from community” or the Romanian for “sad in the country” — he traveled to neutral Switzerland to study philosophy in Zürich. In that safe haven city, Tzara pioneered the Dada movement, becoming one of its earliest practitioners, a fervent international promoter, and (in some versions of the story) even its namer. While others also claim to be the one who founded the word, a prominent tale is that the young Tzara stabbed a dictionary, and the knife pointed to the word “dada” — French for “hobby-horse” and a perfectly meaningless name for a genre of art that insisted on its own meaninglessness.
Dada was a form of art sandwiched between Symbolism and Surrealism. Influenced by nihilism and despair over World War I, which made unprecedented and seemingly pointless carnage an all-too-real fact of life, Dada sought to break traditional artistic conventions and societal strictures — to be a kind of “anti-art” that disregarded the rules and structures of old-guard art-makers and moralists. Dada explicitly disavowed meaning: as a reflection of the universe’s randomness, of Nietzsche’s notion that God was dead, and of the utter absurdity they perceived in the structures of modern life and society, Dada artists sought to create work that was itself empty of meaning. From Tzara’s “cut-ups” (poems and collages created by cutting out words from existing works and piecing them randomly together) to Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” (existing prefabricated objects like shovels simply displayed), Dada was about stirring discomfort, demolishing rules, and unmaking art rather than inviting deeper examination or exploration.
Dada emerged in the midst of and in reaction to World War I, with its earliest history traced to Zürich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, where a group including Tzara often met, collaborated, and performed. Tzara was a particularly vociferous experimenter in the form, working primarily in poetry, collage, and performance. Tzara wrote Dadaism’s earliest texts and manifestos, and called Dada a “magic revolver” and a “furious wind” with “a great negative and destructive work to accomplish.” His performances were anarchic, unpredictable spectacles that included chanting, dance, interpolations of African art, shouting, and reenactments of taboo actions.
A staunch pacifist and anti-nationalist, Tzara claimed in one of his Dada manifestos that the form demanded “No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more armies, no more police, no more fatherlands, enough of all these imbeciles, no more anything, no more anything, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Tzara would go on to start another literary and artistic publication on Dada, and to work tirelessly to promote its tenets globally. He eventually moved to Paris where his performances became even more intentionally frustrating, like drawing enormous crowds to hear Charlie Chaplin lecture on Dada — only to have him never arrive. He was a keen publicist for the genre and his own fame, which led to rifts with some of his fellow Dadaists. But the chaos of Dada wasn’t to last, and neither would those disagreements. By the late 1920s, Surrealism — a form inspired by Dada but very much invested in meaning and psychology — had become dominant in avant-garde circles, and Tzara joined it, rekindling past artistic collaborations and friendships.
The Tzara of Travesties in 1917 is in the heady early days of the art form he pioneered, even if he would bristle at calling it “art” at all. He is a young man, full of passion for remaking the world, for exploding artistic conventions — and, in Stoppard’s play, for Gwendolen. In tension between the modernism of James Joyce, the affected aestheticism of Henry Carr, and the destruction of the war outside Switzerland’s borders, Tzara holds fast to his new-created Dada: “It may be nonsense,” Stoppard’s Tzara says, “but at least it’s not clever nonsense. Cleverness has been exploded, along with so much else, by the war.”
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Travesties by Tom Stoppard is onstage September 8 through October 9, 2022, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
