Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula

“The book allows the reader to see how so much contemporary culture proceeds from the conditions that Dada responded to a century ago in many ways we are still reinventing and catching up to the core innovations and creative disruptions of Dada.”įlicker Theatre & Bar will be transformed into Cabaret Voltaire 1916 on Thursday, Feb. “I was deeply affected by Jed’s book, where he follows the lives of the Dada participants and provides a broad context for their activities, really letting their personalities and ideas come through,” says Mark Callahan, artistic director of ICE.

The series uses Rasula’s recently published art history book Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century as a resource to connect Dada’s historical milestone to Athens’ own position as a center for experimental art. Lanier Distinguished Professor and head of the department of English, to curate a three-week series of performances themed on the past, present and future. In celebration of the centennial year of Dada and the ongoing spirit of experimental art, Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE)-an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts at UGA-collaborated with Jed Rasula, Helen S. Though Cabaret Voltaire was only operated for less than a year, frequent soirees of radically experimental performances of spoken word, dance and live music-often as absurd and destructive as the war existing outside the doors-served as a precursor for Dadaists who continued to reject traditional aesthetics, instead finding artwork as the medium for expressing social and political dissonance. The romanticized birthplace of Dada is storied to be Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub founded by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings in Zurich, Switzerland in February 1916 as a nucleus for avant-garde artistic, literary and political activity. Emerging in opposition to the horrors of World War I, Dada was an international anti-war, anti-bourgeois, anti-art movement of artists and poets who largely rejected logic, rationality and the status quo to embrace chaos, nonsense and intuition.

Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula