Dada Divas unearths, reanimates, and celebrates the stories, legacy, and creative work of the Dada movement’s female pioneers: Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Emmy Hennings, and others. Overshadowed historically by their male counterparts, these women are illuminated by the (re)discovery of their lives and works. Dada Divas draws on the concept of archives to (re)collect artistic works, auto/biographies, and issues important to these Dada instigators, weaving together art and biography through vignettes based on themes, life events, and artistic exploits important to these interdisciplinary artists while commenting on the status of women, immigration, drug addiction, war, and other concerns that are as pressing today as they were when Dada erupted a century ago.
I became interested in the women of Dada in 2014 while pursuing another project, astounded not to have come across them previously even though I had studied Dada and Futurism extensively in graduate school nearly three decades ago. Starting out as a series of independent vignettes, Dada Divas crystallized during months of research as I became determined to create a work that would pay homage to Dada women’s work and lives while integrating my own roles of scholar, performer, and composer.
The libretto features poems and other texts by the original divas of Dada—Emmy Hennings, Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Hannah Höch, and others—and when writing my own texts, I applied their creative practices. Dada Divas also reflects my own process of discovery in that one of its characters is a modern scholar who rummages around in boxes—alluding to archival collections in libraries or forgotten paraphernalia in dusty attics—and encounters curious papers and artifacts. After multiple research trips to Switzerland and Yale University, I still have hundreds of texts and images to examine, but those will have to wait for another project.
In a timely coincidence, my work began shortly before Dada’s centenary, an opportune occasion to reflect on the movement and rediscover these influential yet marginalized women, as well as to highlight Dada’s often overlooked performative aspects and feminist perspectives. Opera is the perfect genre for Dada Divas, since its protagonists were themselves interdisciplinary artists who led complicated lives filled with dramatic, poignant, and sometimes hilarious episodes. All of these women were involved with poetry, performance, feminism, modeling, and visual art, often made with found objects or even junk picked up from the streets. They lived and worked in some of the same locales, and were regarded as highly accomplished by the many significant artists and writers with whom they associated. At various low points in their lives, they endured significant poverty and its consequences. Two suffered the loss of a child, all suffered from neurasthenia, and individually they experienced drug addiction or serious illness; braved prostitution out of necessity; and withstood imprisonment. All died in relative obscurity, largely overlooked by history despite their influential roles and early renown.
My growing collection of vignettes expanded over five years into an opera that confronts many of these topics, and in which nearly all the elements—compositional processes, scenic design, costuming—are either inspired by or illustrate Dada, Futurism, and specific techniques that Dada’s women employed: collage/montage, juxtaposition, non-linearity, found objects/ready-mades, indeterminacy, sound poetry, noise, parody, fusion of “high” and “low” art, etc. I consider my own compositional voice a descendant of these earlier practices. The vignettes offer multiple layers of meaning relevant to both historical and contemporary situations. The dramaturgy examines the paradoxical relationship between the ephemerality of performance and society’s tendency to record and itemize cultural artifacts, and also the irony of anthologizing an artistic movement that sought to abolish such consecration. Much of the subject matter is heavy, recalling the women’s frustration with their personal circumstances, revulsion for war, scorn for bourgeois values, and appeal to overthrow the past. Yet it sometimes is treated rather light-heartedly, taking a cue from early Dada’s contradictory, satirical, anarchic “play,” absurd yet deadly serious.
At the Dada World Fair in San Francisco in November 2016—when an earlier version of Dada Divas was performed just a few days after a fateful election—more than a few attendees suggested that Dada may offer a fitting response to our own alarming time. In their time, the women of Dada were insurgent creative forces to be reckoned with. Presenting an opera based on their works and lives seems incredibly timely given the current sociopolitical climate and interest in rectifying gendered historicity. The women of Dada and their ideas are relevant, inspiring, and provocative still today. The Dada Divas are artistic ancestors whose voices modern women restore into conversations that demand attention.
The full version of Dada Divas was premiered at REDCAT in Los Angeles (February 2020). Various preliminary versions have been performed in Mexico City on the Festival Vértice (October 2018); San Francisco at the Dada World Fair (November 2016); Monterrey, Mexico, on the XIII Festival Internacional Música Nueva (September 2016); Brno and Olomouc, Czech Republic, on the New Music Encounters + Festival (November 2015); and in brief presentations such as at Automata in Los Angeles and the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. The research component of Dada Divas will be presented in lectures and publications, and in 2015–2016 formed the basis of a course at the California Institute of the Arts.
Dada Divas in the news
read about Dada Divas at the Dada World Fair in San Francisco on CalArts' blog 24700
read about Dada Divas in this story from
the Modern Literature & Culture Research Centre at Ryerson University in Toronto
