Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) was a Romanian-born French poet, essayist, and performance artist who helped found Dada and became one of its leading advocates.

Hugo Ball: A German poet and performer who helped establish Zurich Dada and founded the Cabaret Voltaire. Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire performances gave Tzara an early stage and a center for Dada activity.
The Gas Heart: A 1921 play by Tristan Tzara that uses disjointed dialogue and absurd theatrical action. This play brings Tzara’s anti-logical language directly onto the stage.
Cut-up technique: A writing method that rearranges pre-existing words or phrases to produce new texts. Tzara’s chance-poem instructions use a comparable procedure to disrupt deliberate composition.
World War I: A global war fought from 1914 to 1918, centered on Europe and involving many world powers. The war drove exiles to neutral Zurich and fueled Dada’s rejection of the society that produced it.
Hans Arp: An Alsatian artist and poet who helped found Zurich Dada and developed chance-based collage. Arp shared Tzara’s Zurich Dada circle and explored chance as an artistic method.
Seven Dada Manifestos: A collection of Tristan Tzara’s writings on Dada, published in 1924. The collection gathers Tzara’s provocative arguments for Dada’s refusal of conventional art and reason.
Chance operation: An artistic method that lets random processes determine some features of a work. Chance offered Tzara a way to oppose the assumption that poems must express a unified intention.
Zurich Dada: The early Dada movement formed in Zurich during World War I around the Cabaret Voltaire. Tzara became a central organizer and writer in this first Dada circle.
Richard Huelsenbeck: A German writer who carried Dada from Zurich to Berlin and helped define its political direction. Huelsenbeck worked with Tzara in Zurich before promoting a more politically charged Dada in Berlin.
Dada poem: A poem made through Dada techniques such as chance, disruption, and unconventional arrangement. Tzara’s instructions for making poems by chance became a memorable example of Dada procedure.

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