Dada and Futurist Soundscapes in Hungary

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Where does contemporary and postmodern art get its visual flair and drama? What are the roots of performance art and “noise” in classical music? Just over one hundred years ago in Berlin, something radical and new began to appear as comedic cabaret entertainment and visual art. This set in motion Zürich’s Cabaret Voltaire and a series of modernist, democratic responses to established art canons, encouraging new kinds of participatory art. Popular cabarets became virulently nationalistic and democratic. Italian Futurism inspired anti-war artistic movements in both Berlin, Moscow, and the Hungarian literary avant-garde. Dada poetry and sound movements flourished during the Russian Revolution, and artists in socialist Hungary, Yugoslavia, occupied Prague succeeded in publishing Dada journals. In each location that Dada flourished, it achieved a form particular to its surroundings. Parisian Dada co-opted local cabaret culture and combined anti-German (though rarely anti-war) themes into performances. Hungarian and Berlin Dada criticized war and “high art,” glorified anti-war democratic ideas: they merged populist Kitsch with revolutionary speech. This paper presents new research on Hungarian Dada, the Eight, Kineticism, the Activists, Kurt Schwitters, the journal Ma, and conferences sponsored by the Kassák Museum.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Laura Stanfield Prichard lectures regularly for the San Francisco and Chicago Symphonies and opera companies in Boston and San Francisco. Her twenty-five continuous years of college teaching have focused on interdisciplinary cultural analysis of music, dance, and art history: she is a specialist in African American, Latin American, and Pacific Rim cultures. She sings with the Boston and San Francisco Symphony Choruses was the Assistant Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus (1995-2003).