Dada’s Dynamics: New Perspectives on Cabaret Voltaire, Improvisation and
the Festivities of Despair 1916/2025.
Dada emerged at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich 1916 as a profound challenge to the arts in the face of social, political, and cultural crisis. Dr Lewer will consider the generative role played by improvisation in these early Dada performances. She will address the particular challenge for the historian to research these improvised, ephemeral, and unrecorded aspects of what would characterize Dada as an international movement. In addition, she will introduce an ongoing collaborative performance project, Dada Dynamics, that brings diverse movement and sound artists into an encounter with the material fragments that have survived from those performances. Dr Lewer will reflect on what can be learned by entering into the unsettling sensory world of Cabaret Voltaire today, our own age of conflict and rupture.
About the lecturer
Deborah Lewer is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Glasgow, and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow.
