Who's Your DADA?

The multimedia performance Who’s Your DADA? was staged at the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with DADA, an exhibition about the anti-art movement that flourished in Europe between 1916 and 1924. Created with the Wooster Group, the production was conceived as a fictional panel discussion in the museum’s double-height Agnes Gund Garden Lobby.

The speakers sit at a twenty-four-foot-long table supported by medical crutches. A blue screen positioned behind the table enables the superimposition of fictitious video backgrounds while an unscripted discussion unfolds among various Dada writers and performers in their twilight years, including Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Jean Arp, and Hugo Ball. The group reminisces about the notorious Dada nightclub Cabaret Voltaire, recites Dadaist poetry, and argues theory in litigious Dada style.

A remote-controlled robotic video camera moves back and forth along the table on a model train track, capturing the speakers close-up in real time. Live video of these “talk­ing heads” is super­imposed onto various prerecorded scenes and backgrounds on the fly, edited in the style of a documentary. The audience’s attention is split between the panel discussion in front of them and the large LCD monitors positioned behind them.

To reduce costs, the audience of several hundred spectators was seated on lightweight foldable tripod stools that cost less than five dollars apiece. The twisting movement needed to see both the stage and the monitors destabilized the stools, in several instances causing their collapse and sending audience members to the hard floor. After each tumble, the performance stopped while a pair of hairy-chested men in drag, part of the supporting cast, arrived to help viewers to their feet and offered them sturdy chairs before resuming. The shoddy seating was assumed to be part of the performance. No one was hurt.