Jaap Blonk is Dr. Voxoid + Germany Dada (D 1969, Helmut Herbst)
Tonight we add a healthy amount of DADA to our programme:
On the second last day of GEGENkino Jaap Blonk from the Netherlands will pay a visit to LuRu cinema and serve the audience some of his poetic (or whatever the hell you want to call it) pieces. You can get a slight impression of what it will sound like here, though Jaap is going to put himself into the role of Dr Voxoid who will bring his electronic toys and add all kinds of weird sounds to his dadaist vocal performance.
Furthermore, we are going to screen Helmut Herbst’s essential DADA documentary “Deutschland DADA” from 1969 in order get all the DADA history into your brains.
Jaap Blonk is Dr Voxoid & “Deutschland Dada” (GER 1969, D: Helmut Herbst, 61’, German version, 35mm)
Dada is chaos, spontaneity and ridicule, is infantilism par excellence and yet charming. Dada is severity with greatest playfulness, nihilistic protest, radical attack against and on the arts, on any sense in any art. Dada is a representative of a nonsense that by no means wants to be rubbish. In the 1910s and 20s, Dadaists like Hans Richter, Man Ray or Viking Eggeling were riveted by the technical opportunities of making films. Technics and aesthetic experiment merged to small films, visual interferences that served as inspiration for later generations of film makers. Helmut Herbst’s classic “Deutschland Dada” documents the impacts of the worldwide dadaist explosion in a Dadaist alphabet. Among others, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck and Hans Richter talk about the rare moments in which radical social protest and radical art joined forces for a short time.
Dada has always been a phenomenon spreading across different material. Therefore, after the screening, a performance of Dutch vocal poet Jaap Blonk will add to the movie wonderfully. Being one of the most distinctive exponents in his field worldwide, Blonk’s very physical performances pursue a cinema of the ear that articulates a Dadaist poetry regarding language as sound. Written text does not make any narrative sense but is material for composed articulations of sound, which you most certainly have not experienced in this way ever before.
12 April, 9pm – LuRu-Cinema at the Spinnerei – € 8/6 (red.)
