Dada Dynamics: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire 1916/2025, Dundee

Dada Dynamics: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire 1916/2025, Dundee

Venue: Beat Generator

Date: November 27, 2025 at 7:00 PM (doors) for 7:30 PM start

Join us for an unforgettable night of Dada cabaret at Dundee’s legendary Beat Generator live music venue. Brought to you by sonic and movement improvisors from Glasgow’s GIOdynamics, this is a live collective response to the 1916 Cabaret Voltaire’s radical urgency and festivity, deadly seriousness and foolish play, brought up to date in fresh, creative form, for 2025. There will be dance, song, absurd and angry Dada manifestoes, historic sound poems and a unique, rarely heard, entirely sonic wartime Dada Nativity Play by the founder of Dada, Hugo Ball. Dramaturgy by Jer Reid, research and concept by Dada expert Dr. Debbie Lewer of the University of Glasgow. With Aby Watson, Peter Russell, Armin Sturm, Tattie Chater Davies and Colin Greig.

Instigated by Debbie Lewer’s long-standing research into Dada’s origins in Zurich and developed with the creative expertise of Jer Reid, Dada Dynamics is a collaborative exploration of what it can mean to bring spontaneous and interactive sonic, linguistic, somatic and material improvisation to traces of Dada sound poetry, masked dances and bruitistic performance. Led by a spirit of curiosity and discovery, it brings features of improvisation (play, invention, empathy, chance, the integration of emotion, work with silence and voids and more), to remnants of early Dada material performed in the spring of 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire. Dada Dynamics is definitely not a ‘reconstruction’. Rather, it is a contemporary exploration of how a kind of responsive listening to the echoes of the past can create new resonances of that distant, wartime avant-garde. Those resonances speak, we think, in potent ways, to our own conflicted present.

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Host or Publisher College of Arts