Dada Dance

Abstract

Among the founding members of Zurich Dada, Sophie Taeuber created patterned textiles, pure painterly abstraction, anthropomorphic sculpture, intimate dolls, collaborative collages, and live dance performances, but she is predominantly discussed as a designer and applied artist without political motivations. Using a photo of Taeuber in a dancer’s pose and costumed in a Dada body mask, this chapter registers her dance training and performances as a potent hybrid of art and movement that bridged the polarized concerns about art making during wartime. Taeuber’s danced intervention amid her artist colleagues puts Dada’s self-estrangement and alienation into contact with visceral self-recognition and agency. By working across a diversity of media, Taeuber’s process harnesses adaptive, circulating, collaborative, unauthored, and private modes of making, which highlight and bridge the gulf between the aesthetic and the political, or in avant-garde terms, between art and life.