Dada Divas

Dada Divas is composed of vignettes and interludes, some of which can be performed in different orders. A representative order is listed below, along with compositional and historical references.

Four principal female performers play the roles of Emmy Hennings, Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and The Scholar. An optional fifth male performer plays the cameo role of Marcel Duchamp, cross-dressed as Duchamp’s female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy.

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Overture

Amid barroom clatter, the divas prepare for their performance.

Emmy Hennings and the other founders of Dada performed often in cafés and bars, including the legendary Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. In this overture, a field recording from a German café maintains yet subverts the tradition of an instrumental introduction to an opera.

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Babble-On, Re-Belles

The divas mix a subversive sonic tonic.

A snoozing scholar awakens abruptly at her desk. As she resumes working on her research paper about Dada’s “forgotten” women, they emerge from the audience, interrupting her work by clanging pots and pans.

Assaulting the audience’s sensibilities through noise, odor, or violation of personal space was common in Futurist and Dada performances. Additionally, Mina Loy “conversed” with her husband, the Dada artist Arthur Cravan, by banging on pots and pans while he was working on his boat at sea. Here the sonic assault with raucous female voices and domestic cooking utensils signifies an affront to clichés of femininity. Texts include a sound poem by the Baroness, infiltrated by swearing; a “letter” by Emmy Hennings that becomes violently collaged as it takes the voice of a slain World War I soldier wondering what he died for; and word lists that Mina Loy famously created from longer words.

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Madame Mina!

Twisting a famous aria, the Scholar catalogues women of consequence rather than conquest.

Taking a cue from John Cage, who himself was influenced by Dada, this song is a “cheap imitation” of one of Mozart’s most famous arias—Leporello’s “Catalog Aria” (Madamina, il catologo è’il questo . . . ) from Don Giovanni—accompanied by the ukulele, an instrument that references the lute that Emmy Hennings played. Here, women are “cataloged” in an entirely different manner.

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A Tingle, A Tangle

Emmy Hennings hacks her “tingel-tangel” repertoire, singing ditties high and low to disdain war and other nonsense.

“Tingel-tangel” was an early 20th-century German term for lowbrow, often risqué cabaret entertainment. The name probably comes from the sound of coins being tossed into a plate. Emmy Hennings was hailed as a star cabaret performer, and all of the excerpts randomly assembled here come from her repertoire. Art created via indeterminacy figured prominently in Dada, presaging later chance procedures such as those in the music of John Cage.

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Shuttle-cock and Battle-door

Friends play the ancient game of Shuttle-cock and Battle-dore, while Mina succinctly describes a moment of connection or contention.

The divas open a box in which they find unusual objects. While Mina explores the box’s contents, Emmy and the Baroness play the game of Shuttle-cock and Battle-dore with paddle drums—tunable percussion instruments similar to badminton racquets—amid a soundscape of songbirds. Tantalized by the birds’ mating calls and rhythmic back-and-forth of the game, Mina sings of liaisons with her lover, Futurist co-founder Giovanni Papini, ranging from orgasm to real love to fighting. The divas begin imitating the birds while playing with feathers from the box, in which Mina finds an egg that she beholds and then crushes.

Mina Loy’s poem alludes to the sexual act and the battle of the sexes—partially illustrated by changing “battledore” to “battledoor”—as well as to World War I through its references to blood (pink) and “feathers” being strewn. The crushed egg obviously evokes destruction or abortion, and was often referred to as such in her writings.

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Shell-shock and Battle-roar

Raptors infiltrate the women’s pleasant outing, portending a perilous turn of events.

Amid a randomly generated avian soundscape in which mating calls are overtaken by sinister raptors and woodpeckers, the ladies morph their birdcall imitations into sounds of war: shells hissing overhead, the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, and hyperventilating vocalizations that evoke treatments given in World War I to shell-shocked soldiers, whose throats and tongues were electrically shocked in attempts to restore lost speech capabilities. Birds, or birdcages, are another recurring theme in Mina Loy’s poetry and in the Baroness’ attire. Birds of prey are mythologized in several ancient cultures, where they variously symbolize magic, wisdom, danger, or death.

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Klink-Hratzvenga

Baroness Elsa mourns the Baron’s suicide, and vents the divas’ revulsion for war.

The Baroness bewails her husband’s suicide in a virtuosic rendition of one of her poems, using almost exclusively such anguished vocalizations as ululation, multiphonics, and shrieking.

The Baroness’ third husband, the expatriate German Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven, sailed from America to Europe to fight on Germany’s side in World War I. A few years later he took his own life after being released from prison by the French victors, rather than face expected humiliation at home. The text for this vignette is an example of sound poetry—a genre of interest to the Dadas for its capacity to bypass conventions of speech and grammar and instead search for semantic meaning in new combinations of syllables and phonemes. Such vocalizations as wails, cries, and ululations are associated in many cultures with expressions of grief. Examples of near-words include “mardar” and “mardoodar.”

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Embroidery

Tracing decorative patterns through a delightful design, the women become weirdly entangled.

Opening another box, the divas find embroidery hoops and thread. Joined by the Scholar, they begin to ornament themselves along with some audience members, but as they become entangled in their own designs, their ornamentations become grotesque.

This piece consists of a graphic score based on a collage by Dada artist Hannah Höch, with text extracted from a short essay also by Höch. Each performer traces colors or patterns that suggest vocal ornaments expanded from their original subordinate roles to become main musical materials themselves. The piece—and the women—turn grotesque, nodding to Dada women’s desire to resist bourgeois standards of beauty or sexuality by purposely choosing grotesquerie, gender-neutral clothing, or cross-dressing.

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Spawn of Fantasies

Mina recounts her affair with Giovanni Papini, while the Baroness recites one of her poems and Emmy reads a biblical cautionary tale.

Mina claims her personal and sexual freedom as she sings about the paradoxical, erotic, blissful, and messy nature of her affair with Futurist co-founder Giovanni Papini. Reacting to certain things she says, the Baroness reads her poem “Sun Song” and Emmy reproves Mina with a passage from the Bible.

Mina Loy’s eponymous poem—published in the series titled “Songs to Joannes”—was among those banned by U.S. censors due to its explicit sexual references. Overlapping this is a poem by the Baroness (Woo/Die/Woo/Die/Ever! . . . ) and a biblical passage referenced in Loy’s poem, here read by Emmy Hennings (the Parable of the Ten Virgins, Matthew 25:1–13). Hennings converted to Catholicism for the final time in her thirties after earlier attempts, and spent much of her later life enwrapped in ideas of guilt and redemption.

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Taboo

A hidden heretic denounces surgically enforced virginity, while Mina becomes newly entangled.

Emmy and the Baroness ritually bind Mina in an effort to safeguard her virtue, accompanied by a soundscape in which whispered passages that protest female genital mutilation are electronically abstracted to the point of near unintelligibility.

The text for this interlude comes from sources that have been denounced as heretical. Infibulation, followed by binding women’s legs, is still practiced by some cultures around the world (reportedly every eleven seconds). While this interlude veers away from Dada, it raises perennial issues that transcend historical eras. It also satirizes the “fictitious value of women as identified with her physical purity” addressed by Mina Loy, and refers to her radical recommendation of surgically destroying virginity at puberty.

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Mamafesta

Mina and her friends declaim her “Feminist Manifesto,” demanding the demolition of parasitism and prostitution, and advocating motherhood as well as surgery to end enforced virtue.

Taking a cue from Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” Mamafesta satirizes certain conventions of Futurism while also co-opting some of its tenets: chaos, speed, noise, and technology, as well as certain actions described in various manifestos. Manifestos such as this one by Loy, and notably Futurist co-founder Filippo Marinetti, are part of a long history of polemics in the arts, politics, philosophy, religion, and even advertising. Loy’s manifesto remained unpublished during her lifetime. The title takes its name from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

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Spring in Middle

The Baroness, musing over midlife, salutes the sun and soars.

On her fiftieth birthday the Baroness visited the French embassy in Berlin, where she attempted once again to secure a visa to move to Paris. On that occasion she wore a highly eccentric out t that featured an elaborate birthday cake as a hat, replete with fifty lit candles, reportedly in hopes of entrancing the consul. She failed in her endeavor, but to commemorate it we have this lovely poem and reports of her excursion.

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I don’t care . . .

In a haze, Mina recounts her feelings about a forced loss while the Baroness talks of a peculiar procedure.

This poem by Mina Loy probably refers to her likely loss of Giovanni Papini’s child/children, either through abortion or his refusal to have children with her. Abortion was illegal at that time. Both Loy and Emmy Hennings lost infants to illness, and Loy’s older son died when his father abducted him and took him on a boat to the south seas. The Baroness was sent to a sanatorium to have a “womb twiddling” treatment as a ruse to mask her first husband’s impotence.

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Infusion

 The divas partake of various substances, leading to lunacy and lethargy.

The Baroness smokes cannabis to escape her grief, Mina Loy snorts cocaine as her elixir, and Emmy Hennings injects morphine to quell her anxiety and withdrawal. The women’s drug-induced states begin with silliness, manic laughter, or relief, but then become darker, ending in stupor.

All three of these women actually used these substances, and in fact morphine and cocaine were used widely by artists in the early 20th century. Hennings became seriously addicted to morphine and ether, and entered a clinic for treatment. Drug addiction was rampant then as now.

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Morfin

In the gloom of rain and stupor, Emmy oscillates between anxiety and ennui, finding hope only in something beyond.

Mina and the Baroness lose consciousness. Hallucinating, Emmy sings of her lethargy and indifference over a soundscape of dripping water, sighs, wind, and rustling leaves. Lulled by darkness and the patter of rain, she falls asleep with the others. The Scholar covers them with old blankets.

Rather than drawing on Dada or Futurism, this setting of Emmy Hennings’ eponymous poem focuses on musical characteristics and psychological states associated with early 20th-century Expressionism, with which she also was involved. Hennings was a widely published expressionist and also anarchist in her pre-Dada days, and this poem—though not Dada in nature—was performed frequently on Dada events.

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Virgins + Curtains – Dots = Gefängnis

Imprisoned in a Victorian world, the Scholar and Mina recount maidens’ hopes and despairs as they are presented on the marriage market. Housebound or imprisoned, lacking dowries or destinies, their surest emancipation lies in choosing death.

The title of this vignette, written as an equation in a nod to Futurist practice, refers to two poems by Mina Loy and Emmy Hennings that are interwoven to form the text. Many similarities exist between the two poems, even though they refer, respectively, to bourgeois existence and life in prison. “Dot” is an archaic expression for dowry. “Gefängnis” means prison in German. Both Hennings and the Baroness actually were imprisoned, variously for prostitution, theft, forging draft documents, and being suspected of being a German spy.

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F’Art

As the Scholar recounts the Baroness’ tale of a faux pas, the divas sing a scatological hymn.

The Baroness is famous for her scatological humor; this little story from her autobiography is no exception. She seems to take joy in the discomfort of her partner for the evening, and good riddance! The Dadas were infamous for taking well-known pieces—drinking songs, patriotic tunes, military songs, hymns—and changing their lyrics. This newly composed chorale piously sets a scatological text by the Baroness.

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This is Mine!

The Baroness reclaims what is rightfully hers, unseating a famous masquerading man.

This brief encounter sets the record straight about who made one of the most famous artworks of the 20th century. Here a pink children’s toilet takes the place of Marcel Duchamp’s (in)famous “Fountain,” actually a urinal. It is now almost universally accepted that the Baroness was the actual mastermind behind this piece for which Duchamp took credit. Duchamp’s studio was in the same building as the Baroness’ flat in New York, and for a time she was in love with him. The character of Rrose Sélavy, played here by a guest performer in a cameo role, was Duchamp’s female alter ego for over twenty years.

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Rubbish

Refusing to repudiate refuse, the divas create a hodgepodge collage.

Both the Baroness and Mina Loy collected refuse to be turned into art works and collages (much to the chagrin of Loy’s children, in her later life). They also both seemed to collect used egg cartons and tin cans. In this piece the divas construct a collage out of rubbish and products mentioned by the Baroness in some of her commercially inspired satirical poems, accompanied by a similarly satirical series of vintage ad excerpts and radio static determined anew in each performance via chance operations.

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Going Bananas

The divas’ consumerist collage goes commercial.

In this piece, three of the Baroness’ collaged poems are combined into yet another collage. In her poems the Baroness frequently spoofed various American products and obsessions (cleanliness was one), while Hannah Höch collaged advertisements to make social and political commentaries. Emmy Hennings was familiar with the art of selling—everything from her body to toilet supplies and perfume peddled door-to-door. In her later life, the Baroness also hawked newspapers on the street in exhausting 14-hour sessions (and, in her earlier life, herself).

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I wonder what I meant by it all

Mina, recorded in her twilight years, reads and reminisces.

Mina notices the sound of a ticking clock. Searching for its source, she opens a box from which she hears a recording of her own voice, and picks up a notebook of her writings. Wandering through the theater, she tears out scraps of poetry and gives them to audience members.

This interlude is composed of selected phrases from an interview with Mina Loy in 1965, when she was 82 years old. The added static of a phonograph record reflects a bygone era as well as the Dadas’ and Futurists’ use of noise. The ticking clock reflects the passage of time, a recurring theme in her poetry. As Loy mentions, she created chance-derived poems by ripping up bits of paper with words or phrases, dropping them on the ground, and then randomly picking them up and ordering them. (Incidentally, this chance methodology preceded Dada co-founder Tristan Tzara’s recommendation for pulling words out of a hat.)

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C(L)ock-Tale

Mina sings of a rather unlady-like subject.

This piece sets another of Mina Loy’s poems banned by U.S. censors for its scandalous language and topic, creating quite a reputation for her. In this poem, Loy both delights in and bemoans the male “skin-sack” and its inability to fulfill her desires for either sex or children, also noting the incompatibility of male “clock” time and female “cyclical” time.

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Pandora’s Pox

A strange box sparks sounds that surprise and seduce.

A music box plays the popular French cabaret tune “Valse Brune” (in German, “Nur Liebe ist Leben), one of Emmy Hennings’ favorite songs to perform.

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Sold!

The Scholar enunciates an economic exchange.

Mixing snippets of text from Mina Loy’s unpublished autobiographies with auctioneering patter, the Scholar auctions off the collage constructed in the previous piece Rubbish to the highest bidder. Audience participation is encouraged.

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It’s a Gas

Losing hope, Emmy and the Baroness huff diethyl ether, while Mina chants its chemical characteristics. The Baroness expires.

The Baroness learns that her visa application to move to France has been denied. Depressed, she joins Emmy in her ether habit. As Mina chants hypnotically about the chemical formulation of ether and its various effects, the Baroness dies of gas inhalation.

This setting of Emmy Hemmings’ poem “Aether” evokes the intoxicating effects experienced while huffing ether, auditory and visual distortions experienced while wearing gas masks (as would have been experienced by soldiers in World War I), and Marinetti’s manifesto “Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation.” It also satirizes the cliché of female characters frequently dying in operas. The Baroness actually died of asphyxiation, though it is still unknown whether by accident, suicide, or murder.

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HUIHIHAJALLA

Intoning one of the Baroness’ poems, the Scholar resuscitates her and resurrects dada’s divas.

Emmy and Mina lament the Baroness’ death. The Scholar, performing incantations from a book of the Baroness’ own sound poems, resurrects her. The divas sing a celebratory chorale that soon goes berserk, and finally take their rightful historical bows.

The Baroness’ resurrection refers to her historical rediscovery as well as another operatic cliché of a supernatural force intervening in the plot—deus ex machina. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the scholars—most of whom are women—who are resurrecting such work and helping it attain the status that it should have had all along. “My campaign: to gain their acclaim!”

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