Pfauen
«We live in the age of simultaneity. We are in the anniversary of the trap effect. Since no art, politics, or confession seem to be able to cope with this break in the dam of meaning and destruction, all that remains are high jinks, the singing void, and bleeding travesty.»
This was not written by a contemporary in 2024, but by Hugo Ball in 1914 in Munich. With the artist group Blauer Reiter, he was working on theater that would depict, destroy, and reformat the unbridled present. The idea materialized somewhat later in Zurich, where in 1916 Ball's artist friends Tzara, Huelsenbeck, and Janco performed the world's first simultaneous poems. Driven from their homeland by the war, they recited texts in different languages, created sounds, and stretched out words.
Zurich director, musician, and stage designer Thom Luz now takes on the simultaneous poem – one of the main disciplines in Dada – in a staging of thickets, superimposition, and productive dissonance. A plea for polyphony and complexity, a renegotiation of sense and nonsense.