- Title
- L'Amiral Cherche Une Maison à Louer
- Main creator(s)
- Tzara, Tristan, Huelsenbeck, Richard and Janco, Marcel
- Date
- 1916
- Ism or art movement
- Dada
- Subject area(s)
- Theatre
- URL
- http://www.ubu.com/sound/tzara.html
- Classification
- primary
- Notes on URL
- On this page you can listen to this simultaneous poem using realplayer (or you can download the MP3 file). This recording was made by the Italian Trio Excoco (Hanna Aurbacher, Theophil Maier and Ewald Liska). Note that Huelsenbeck’s name is spelled incorrectly on this page.
This page also includes an interview with Tzara called ‘Dada into Surrealism’ (MP3 file). The interviewer speaks English but Tzara replies in French. - Copyright information
- Rights Cleared
- Other available format
- CD; score in book
- Notes on other available format
- FUTURISM & DADA REVIEWED 1912-1959 (ltm recordings, LTMCD 2301)
LIPSTICK TRACES (Rough Trade Records #R2902, 1993, Various Artists)
The Katzenjammer Kabarett version of the piece (which is funkier and more electronic than that of the Trio Excoco) can be heard at: http://www.radioblogclub.com/open/88475/apres_moi/Katzenjammer%20Kabarett%20-%20L%27Amiral%20Cherche%20Une%20Maison%20A%20Louer
A reproduction of the first two pages of the score can be found in Melzer's Dada and Surrealist Performance' p. 38. - Description/ rationale
- The Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, founded by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, is generally accepted as the birthplace of Dada. It was here a few weeks later, on 30 March 1916, that Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Janco performed the first ‘simultaneous poem’, a collaborative text entitled ‘L’amiral Cherche Une Maison à Louer’ (‘The Admiral Looks for a House to Rent’). This is a poem that could really only exist in space and time – in other words, as performance. Meaning was to be derived experientially, not through discursive language.
According to Ball (who also performed his own ‘sound poems’), the simultaneous poem was ‘a contrapuntal recitative in which three or more voices speak, sing, whistle, etc. at the same time, in such a way that the elegaic, humorous or bizarre content of the piece is brought out by these combinations… Noises (an rrr drawn out for minutes or crashes, or sirens, etc.) are superior to the human voice in energy’ (quoted in Goldberg, Performance Art, p. 58).
The simultaneous poem expressed the tensions in early Zurich Dada. As Janco stated, ‘We had lost confidence in our ‘culture’. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin after the tabula rasa’. (Janco, ‘Dada at Two Speeds’, p. 36). This, however, was not a simple nihilist statement; there was a sense that this void could be filled with something, if only a performing presence. ‘Simultaneity is against what has become, and for what is becoming,’ according to Huelsenbeck: ‘From the everyday events surrounding me (the big city, the Dada circus, crashing, screeching, steam whistles, house fronts, the smell of roast veal), I obtain an impulse which starts me toward direct action… and so ultimately a simultaneous poem means nothing but ‘Hurrah for life!’’ (quoted in Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance, p. 36).
The performance was still meant to be a provocative gesture, designed to shake up complacent bourgeois audiences. As Ball goes on to say about the power of sound in the quotation above, ‘In a generalized and compressed form it represents the battle of the human voice against a world whose rhythms and whose din are inescapable’. (quoted in Melzer, p. 42).
It is also significant that ‘L’Amiral’ was written and performed in several languages by political exiles (Tzara and Janco were both Romanian Jews and Huelsenbeck was German). It can be considered both anti-mechanistic and anti-war. T.J. Demos suggested in The Dada Seminars that ‘L'amiral cherche une maison à louer’ comments on the wartime experience of exile and trauma by enacting a kind of linguistic wandering. - Learning and teaching examples
- 1) Compare L’Amiral’s linguistic experiments and the way it has been (and may be) performed to Orghast (1971), Peter Brook’s collaboration with Ted Hughes. Are the aesthetic and political impulses behind them essentially similar or radically different?
2) Using the poem and its performances as inspiration, have students collaborate in groups of three to create their own performance text.
a. This should be done as a dramaturgical exercise that moves between individual and group ‘writing/notating’, ‘improvising’ and ‘devising/structuring’ exercises in order to compose the final performance score.
b. If at all possible, groups should work in three different languages, plus develop a shared vocabulary of invented ‘sounds’.
c. After the groups have performed their own texts, they should attempt to perform one created by another group. Record and compare the different performances of the same text.
3) Discuss the experience of listening to/watching a performance of L’Amiral (or a text inspired by it). How is meaning made and understood? What implications does this have for the concept of ‘meaning’ in performance?
4) Discuss the possible significance of the title of the poem.
5) Discuss how this collaboratively produced simultaneous poem
fundamentally differs from a solo sound poem like Huelsenbeck’s ‘Phantastische Gebeté’ of the same year (link below). - Suggestions for background literature or other relevant resources:
- Annabelle Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 edition).
Interviews with Huelsenbeck & Tzara: Inventing Dada/Dada into Surrealism (MP3) http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dada-Sounds.html
Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds.) The Dada Seminars(Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, and New York: D.A.P., 2005).
RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988 edition), pp. 54 – 66.
Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘Bring Da Noise: A Brief Survey of Sound Art’ (2004), New Music Box http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=59tp01
Marcel Janco, ‘Dada at Two Speeds’, trans. Margaret I. Lippard, in Dadas on Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971).
Marcel Janco moved to Israel in 1941 where he established Ein Hod, an artists’ village. The Janco Dada Museum was founded there in 1983. This is the link to the museum website: http://ein-hod.israel.net/dada/mainen.htm
Richard Huelsenbeck reads his sound poem ‘Phantastische Gebeté’, 1916. MP3 file plus biographical notes. http://www.ubu.com/sound/hulsenbeck.html
Contributor details
Roberta Mock, Plymouth University
