I attended yesterday evening, with the artist Jill Rock, the ‘Salon Voltaire’ at London University’s Senate House.
Loosely inspired by the original Dada cabaret in Zürich, it was held in the Chancellor’s Hall, decorated in fairy lights, with LED lights of continually changing colours in upside-down exploded plastic bottles on each table – unlike the basic space I saw in the nineties, on a visit to the original site of the Cabaret Voltaire.
The evening really took off when finally a group appeared as if from nowhere (different from the stock academic introductions to the earlier presentations, with lists of prizes, positions held etc., rather un-Dada really). This group, the Vocal Constructivists, began to sing extraordinary music, responding to the acoustics of the hall to produce penetrating pitches, which emerged suddenly from the edges of complex and continually changing harmonic and contrapuntal textures.
As always with Dada-inspired events, what went wrong was most truly in the Dada spirit. For example, someone earlier had knelt down to fix a technical problem, revealing to the audience rather more than intended, courtesy of today’s fashionably low-slung jeans, and the directed stage lighting.
Loosely inspired by the original Dada cabaret in Zürich, it was held in the Chancellor’s Hall, decorated in fairy lights, with LED lights of continually changing colours in upside-down exploded plastic bottles on each table – unlike the basic space I saw in the nineties, on a visit to the original site of the Cabaret Voltaire.
The evening really took off when finally a group appeared as if from nowhere (different from the stock academic introductions to the earlier presentations, with lists of prizes, positions held etc., rather un-Dada really). This group, the Vocal Constructivists, began to sing extraordinary music, responding to the acoustics of the hall to produce penetrating pitches, which emerged suddenly from the edges of complex and continually changing harmonic and contrapuntal textures.
As always with Dada-inspired events, what went wrong was most truly in the Dada spirit. For example, someone earlier had knelt down to fix a technical problem, revealing to the audience rather more than intended, courtesy of today’s fashionably low-slung jeans, and the directed stage lighting.