Ilia Zdanevitch

This is the program for the second staging of Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist play, “Le Coeur à Barbe.”It was first staged two year prior at the Dada Salon in Paris. This later staging was much larger, coinciding with the presentation of the manifesto of the same name. Costumes were by Sonia Delaunay, who introduced Zdanevitch to the group. This performance was the final stroke in the separation between the two factions within Dadaism, with Picabia and Breton leaving to form Surrealism. It was not merely a philosophical divorce, however, as the two groups came to blows before the performance was over. The three-act play itself is an absurdist conversation between characters named after body parts (eg Mouth, Nose, etc.), wherein they each insert their own body-names into popular phrases, metaphors, and proverbs. A type of spastic ballet was also acted out in the production. It is generally considered to be the last artifact made by the original Dada collective