In Our Time

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball and others gathered on a small stage, sometimes dressed in cardboard, often performing nonsense poems. This was the start of Dada, a spirit more than a movement which spread to other cities in Europe during the war. In part the Dadas (as they called themselves) were protesting against the inevitability of constant wars on the continent and in part this was an artistic experiment around the absurd; they were creating poems, songs, costumes and art that made no obvious sense, just as the war around them made no sense to the artists, designers and poets at the Cabaret Voltaire.With Dawn Ades Emeritus Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of EssexRuth Hemus Professor of French and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of LondonAndStephen Forcer Professor of French at