To understand the wild, often confrontational, landscape of performance art, one must journey back to a smoke-filled room in Zurich during the height of the First World War. It was here, at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, that Dadaism exploded onto the scene – less an art movement, more an anti-art uprising. Born from disillusionment, disgust at the war’s senseless slaughter, and a profound rejection of the bourgeois values that led to it, Dada sought not to create beauty, but to tear down the very definition of art and logic. And crucially, its primary weapon was often live action, chaotic happenings that laid the indispensable groundwork for what would later evolve into performance art.
The Cacophony of Dada Performance
Dada wasn’t confined to manifestos or static objects; it thrived in the ephemeral, the noisy, the deliberately nonsensical event. Hugo Ball, a key founder, reciting his sound poems like ‘Karawane’, clad in a bizarre cardboard costume, wasn’t just reciting poetry; he was embodying the breakdown of language, reducing it to pure, primal sound. Tristan Tzara orchestrated “simultaneous poems,” where multiple voices recited different texts concurrently, creating an intentional, overwhelming cacophony designed to mirror the chaos of the modern world and shatter passive spectatorship. These weren’t polite readings; they were assaults on sensibility.
Dada evenings were deliberately provocative. Artists would insult the audience, stage nonsensical plays, incorporate chance elements (like Tzara pulling words from a hat to construct a poem), and blend mediums with reckless abandon. Music clashed with recitation, dance bumped against visual absurdity. The goal was often less about presenting a coherent piece and more about generating a reaction, shocking the audience out of complacency, and fundamentally questioning the relationship between performer, art, and spectator. They used masks, puppets, abstract costumes, and sheer noise to disrupt expectations. It was theatre of the absurd, but stripped of narrative convention and amplified with anarchic energy.
Key Elements Inherited by Performance Art
The reverberations of these Zurich nights, and subsequent Dada activities in Berlin, Paris, and New York, echo powerfully through the history of performance art. Several core tenets of Dada performance became foundational pillars for later artists who used their bodies and actions as their primary medium.
Rejection of Traditional Forms: Just as Dada spat on traditional painting, sculpture, and literature, performance art inherently challenges the commodity status of art objects and the conventions of theatre or dance. It often exists outside galleries or theatres, in public spaces or unconventional venues, mirroring Dada’s anti-establishment stance. The focus shifts from a finished product to the process, the action, the presence of the artist.
The Artist’s Body as Material: Hugo Ball in his geometric costume, Emmy Hennings singing and dancing, George Grosz and John Heartfield holding provocative placards in Berlin – Dadaists placed their own bodies at the centre of their artistic interventions. This prefigured the central role the artist’s body would play in performance art, whether enduring physical hardship, exploring identity, or using gesture and presence as the core material.
Embrace of Chance and the Irrational: Dada’s fascination with chance operations and illogical juxtapositions directly influenced later movements like Fluxus and Happenings, both crucial precursors and contemporaries of performance art. The idea that art could arise from randomness, from unplanned encounters, or from following absurd instructions broke the mould of the artist as sole, rational creator. This opened the door for improvisation, audience participation that couldn’t be fully predicted, and process-based works where the outcome wasn’t predetermined.
Dada’s embrace of performance was radical because it rejected the artwork as a stable, finished commodity. Instead, it prioritized the live event, the direct confrontation with the audience, and the use of absurdity and chance. These elements directly challenged the prevailing notions of artistic value and practice at the time. This ephemeral, action-based approach became a cornerstone for subsequent generations of performance artists.
Audience Confrontation and Participation: Dadaists didn’t want passive observers; they wanted a reaction, even if it was outrage. Insults, nonsense, direct address – these tactics were meant to break the fourth wall and implicate the audience in the event. Performance art frequently adopts similar strategies, seeking to provoke thought, discomfort, or direct engagement, refusing to let the viewer remain a detached onlooker. The relationship is often intentionally charged, unstable, and interactive.
Interdisciplinarity: The chaotic blend of poetry, music, visual elements, puppetry, and movement in Dada performances tore down the silos between artistic disciplines. Performance art is fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing freely from visual art, theatre, dance, music, activism, and everyday life. It refuses easy categorization, much like its Dadaist ancestors.
The Enduring Anarchic Spirit
While Dada as a formal movement burned brightly but briefly, its legacy in performance is undeniable and profound. It wasn’t necessarily a direct, linear inheritance of specific techniques, but rather the transmission of a radical spirit: a spirit of negation, of questioning, of using live action to disrupt norms and challenge perceptions. Dada shattered the idea that art must be polite, beautiful, or even logical. It demonstrated that the act itself, the presence of the artist engaging directly with the world and the audience, could be the artwork.
Later artists, from the creators of Happenings in the late 1950s and the Fluxus artists with their event scores, to the body artists of the 1970s and contemporary performers working today, owe a significant debt to those early Dada provocateurs. The willingness to use absurdity, to embrace the ephemeral, to challenge institutions, and to place the artist’s own actions and body at the forefront of the creative act – these are all currents that flow directly from the noisy, chaotic, revolutionary heart of Dada. It provided a crucial permission slip for artists to break rules, mix forms, and use performance as a potent tool for social commentary and aesthetic disruption, ensuring its echoes are still felt in the most cutting-edge performance works today.
Beyond Direct Influence: An Attitude
Perhaps more important than specific techniques was the attitude Dada fostered. It was an attitude of irreverence, of skepticism towards established power structures (including those within the art world), and a belief in the power of absurdity to reveal deeper truths about a fractured world. Performance art often carries this same critical, questioning energy. It probes societal norms, political realities, and personal identities through actions that might seem bizarre or nonsensical on the surface, but which, like Dada performance, aim to jolt the audience into a new awareness. The legacy isn’t just historical; it’s an ongoing philosophical and practical approach to making art through action in the world.
