Dada East

by Tom Sandqvist

"In Dada East Tom Sandqvist shows that Dada did not spring full-grown from a Zurich literary salon but grew out of an already vibrant artistic tradition in Eastern Europe - particularly Romania - that was transposed to Switzerland when a group of Romanian modernists settled in Zurich. Bucharest and other cities in Romania had been the scene of Dada-like poetry, prose, and spectacle in the years before World War I. One of the leading lights was Tristan Tzara, who begn his career in avant-garde literature at fifteen when he cofounded the magazine Simbolul. Tzara - who himself coined the term "Dada," inspired by an obscure connection of his birthday to an Orthodox saint - was at the Cabaret Voltaire that night, along with fellow Romanians Marcel, Jules, and Georges Janco and Arthur Segal. It's not a coincidence, Sandqvist argues, that so many of the first dadaist group was Romanians. Sandqvist traces the artistic and personal transformations that took place in the "little Paris of the Bal