Word: dadaists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...York Cézannists, the traumatic blow of the 1913 Armory Show (partly reconstituted here, with 19 of its more aggressively modern works, including Duchamp's then infamous Nude Descending a Staircase), and the absorption of cubism by New York, which was itself, as the Dadaist Picabia remarked, "the only cubist town in the world." And so on to the surrealist artists who, sponsored by Peggy Guggenheim in the '30s and '40s, helped provoke the climactic movement of the early American avantgarde: abstract expressionism...
...careers and the genre of punk rock with a blend of nihilism and unheard-of histrionics. Iggy vomited on stage, stabbed himself with pencils, burned his skin with hot wax, flung himself onto broken glass and even leaped off the stage to harass the audience physically. Like a modern Dadaist, Iggy's style was confrontation, and his musical and theatrical lead inspired many later rockers. The mania for the stage spectaculars of Alice Cooper and others of his ilk was engendered in part by the Stooges' outrageous antics...
...first act involves Carr, Gwendolyn (Katharine McGrath), Carr's sister and a Joyce patron, Joyce himself (played by James Booth), and Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist artist. While on orders from London to keep an eye on the Bolshevist Lenin, Carr finances Joyce's theater troupe in a performance of Ernest, for which Joyce promises him the lead role. After the opening library scene, the lights dim and the spotlights come out on Carr, an old man in a housecoat who sets the scene and reminisces about the old days in Zurich. The play, but especially this scene, showcases the talents...
...strength of the play is in the first act. Carr's friend, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara drops by for tea. Carr gets an explanation of anti-art, says Dada in Zurich is the high point of European culture-topographically speaking-and proclaims, "My art belongs to Dada!" But the best scene is a confrontation between Joyce and Tzara, who is hard at work cutting up volumes of poetry, putting the scraps in his hat, and drawing them out randomly to create anti-poetry. Joyce has come to borrow money for his English Players, but stays to argue with Tzara...
...show, a technically excellent production, is aided by the excellent cast, and in the end it's the play itself that shines, witty, exhilarating-Stoppard may be the most prolific writer of memorable epigrams in English since Pope. As for the questions he raises, there is something of the Dadaist in him-art for art's sake, and all-and something of an E.M. Forster English traditionalist. But revolutionary potentialities excite him, as they do most of the rest of us most of the time, and this keeps him from sliding into a morass of pity for poor Carr...