Dada Garden

Celebrating a century of Dada, in a garden setting

Performances of improvised and experimental music
Installations, sound art, horticulture, notallotments
Experimental video, dada manifestations, things left behind

Sunday April 24th 2016, Wimborne, Dorset

Musical performances

Watt Tyler – improvised set with found sounds and objects
Max Betancourt – ambient electronic explorations with found objects
Gerauschhersteller Ensemble – performance of Sculptures Musicales (John Cage 1989, ex Marcel Duchamp)
Matthew Shaw – electro-acoustic improvisations
Order of the Hoof - experimental guitar ensemble
Jon Lloyd & John Law – free improvisation, wind instruments + effects
Rochelle Rochelle – improvisations featuring guitar and electronics

Installations in the garden

Language Timothy! present a Dada audio experience in a pop-up bobblehat.
Lynn Davy & Adrian Newton ‘The forest of austerity’
set of kinetic sculptures made out of food-related found objects, mixing Dada with WWI food-related propaganda.
Adrian & Arthur Newton – ‘Notallotments’
what happens when allotments are sold off for development: a post-horticultural holocaust
Matthew Shaw – from behind the foliage

Curated set of sonic art pieces to be broadcast from willow teepees:

metamedia  – Scrapyard
Joe Evans  – Elemental states
Nemeton – Isn’t it strange? It is  (featuring cut-up extracts of poetry by Dada poets Kurt Schwitters and Hugo Ball, subjected to a series of chance procedures)
Michael Tanner – Four Stones for Montague Druitt (for Voice, Viola, Autoharp and River). A generative piece made of evolving tape loops by featuring: Emma Morton – Vocals; Alison Cotton – Viola
Finglebone – lucid, I shall be a ghost, the presence of malevolence

Video / stills

David Rogers – 1. butterfly 2. [dis]location
Arthur Newton – Intangible heritage of humanity; Fimbulwinter; Yarnbomb
Nemeton – N/um; unmotion
Stills of original Dada artworks and propaganda

Dada Garden was designed as a prelude to ‘What they left behind’, a theatre piece that was performed in the centre of Wimborne during May 2016. Through objects and memories, the piece explores the legacy of 1916 and its effect on people in Wimborne, focusing particularly on the First World War.

About Dada
In 1916, a group of young artists including Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Taeuber and Hans Richter, launched a series of performances in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. This new, irrational art movement would be named Dada. Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. The movement rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition.

The cabaret went on to feature radically experimental artists, many of whom went on to change the face of their artistic disciplines; e.g. Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Max Ernst. Key contributions relating to art technique included collage, cut-ups, photomontage, assemblage, readymades, use of found objects, and performance art. From Stuart Davis’ abstractions to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, from Jasper Johns’ targets and flags to Robert Rauschenberg’s collages and combines—almost anywhere you look in modern and contemporary art, Dada did it first.

Dada’s influence extended to sound and music: Kurt Schwitters developed what he called “sound poems” and composers such as Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Heusser and Albert Savinio began writing “dada music”. The movement influenced later styles such as the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, pop art and Fluxus. “Fundamentally, since Dada,” Andre Breton wrote, not long before his death, “we have done nothing.”