[Dadaday! #1]

Footage from "Dadaday!," a celebration of the Dada art movement on its 60th anniversary, in Buffalo, NY. Including performances by Sally Rubin, Eberhard Blum, Jan Williams, and Donald Knaack.

00:43Copy video clip URL Camera set-up. A sign reading “Dadaday!” is held in front of the camera. 

01:01Copy video clip URL A presenter, speaking in an exaggerated posh accent, introduces “the original Dadas,” just arriving from “Zurich, Switzerland, where Dada was born sixty years ago on February 5” to Buffalo. Two people dressed in all black with giant letters reading “DA” walk up to the presenter. Asked to explains “what Dada means,” one Dada replies with a nonverbal noise and the other replies “No thank you.” 

01:46Copy video clip URL The trio walk down stairs, then walk in front of the building while spinning. The presenter delivers a monologue while spinning and weaving between the other two. 

02:40Copy video clip URL Footage of the letters, with someone offscreen chanting “Dada.”

03:04Copy video clip URL The outside of the New York Central Railroad Co. building. Inside the building, the presenter asks the Dadas a question and received nonsensical answers. The duo walks through the station incessantly repeating “Dada” out loud. They circle around a sculpture of a buffalo. 

07:06Copy video clip URL At the Albright-Knox gallery, the Dadas and the presenter celebrate the anniversary of the opening at the Cabaret Voltaire. They interact with the gallery audience and with the artworks, including Marcel Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze?

11:20Copy video clip URL Outside of Hallwalls in the snow. The presenter lists the events of Dadaday, including film screenings, and mentions that attendees can bring their artwork to be burned. 

13:18Copy video clip URL Walking through galleries. 

14:03Copy video clip URL Sally Rubin reads Hugo Ball’s “First Dada Manifesto.” 

18:56Copy video clip URL Eberhard Blum reads Ball’s Dadaist poem “gadji beri bimba.” An audience member holds up a hand puppet. 

20:35Copy video clip URL Blum reads Ball’s Dadaist poem “Karawane.” 

22:02Copy video clip URL Blum reads Raoul Hausmann’s poem “kp’erioum.” 

23:04Copy video clip URL Rubin reads Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Excites Everything”: “Dada has always existed. The holy virgin was already a Dadaist!”

26:53Copy video clip URL Donald Knaack explains his process for creating instruments to play Marcel Duchamp’s “Erratum Musical” a musical composition involving a complex mechanical instrument “in which the virtuoso intermediary is suppressed.” Knaack performs the piece.