‘Dada’ Sounds Like Nonsense, but It’s Music to Their Ears

OOoooooooowooooooooOOOOOOOO-AaaaaaaaDADA!

Dadadadadadadadadadada.

Dadadadadadadada.

Want to hear more? Be at the Newport Harbor Art Museum tonight at 8 for “That Dada Strain,” a mosaic of music and words by poet Jerome Rothenberg and string bass player Bertram Turetzky, who will be appearing as part of the museum’s Contemporary Culture Series.

The Dada movement sprouted near the start of the century and was devoted to expressing--in Rothenberg’s words--”spontaneity and disgust.” Dadaists were playfully serious pied-pipers to surrealists, and their muse clearly lives on in Rothenberg: “That Dada Strain” has the crazy beat of corn in a popper as the 56-year-old poet declaims his words and wordless sounds (“Dada was like a child’s word, a nonsense word, and the Dadaists filled it with any meaning they wanted,” Rothenberg explains). Turetzky beats, plucks and sometimes even conventionally plays his bass. OOOOhhh, overflowing Daaaaada!

Rothenberg teaches writing, visual arts, performance poetry and a lot of other things that he says add up to a sort of Dada academic package at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Until 1986, he taught at UC San Diego, where he and Turetzky met and started performing “That Dada Strain” 10 years ago. They have performed across the United States and in Europe, Rothenberg said.

Dressed in beatnik black, Rothenberg is the extrovert of the pair, with his gray goatee, a fringe of long hair and eyes that open wide with every Dada. Turetzky, 54, is the heavyset straight man, eyes always down, hands always moving. Rothenberg has written 30 books of poetry; Turetzky has recorded more than 300 new works for bass, many written for him.

A few fragments and images that leap out of the verbal-sonic jungle one enters with Rothenberg and Turetzky:

“Thinking hats are never hats.”

“Logic is always wrong.”

“Ballet of sperms.”

True, it may seem quaint now. But Dadaism was a shocker back in 1916 when a German actor and playwright named Hugo Ball founded the movement in a Zurich cabaret. Drawing on psychoanalytical ideas and anti-bourgeois social attitudes, Ball and numerous artists and writers touched by the Dada spirit were reacting to the disillusionment spawned by World War I. Central figures included Romanian poet Tristan Tzara (who, pre-Dada, was named Sammy Rosenstock) and writer-painter Francis Picabia, as well as artists Jean Arp and Kurt Schwitters.

Dadaists’ embrace of irrationality as an antidote to falsified rationality, their anarchic sense of fantasy--it’s all there in “That Dada Strain.”

“Most of the words are my poetry addressed to the founders of Dada,” Rothenberg said. He demonstrated:

“Dada dada da da da da dada da da dadada dada da da da da dada da dadadada dadaDADADA DADADDA da dada dada. . . .”

He added, “It changes every time we do it.”

The ending of the piece is one of its more conventional sections: “At Center of a dream--magnetic eyes. The Center is a center and in the center is another center and in each center is a center. And a center on each center. Centered. Centering. Composed by Centers. Like Earth, the brain, the passage to other worlds, passage to something sad, lost Dada, an old horse riding in the dark.”

For most of the concerts, Turetzky is content to play his modernistic accompaniment to Rothenberg’s verbalizations. Then, toward the end, as if “That Dada Strain” indeed were an infectious one, the bassist’s mouth opens, his head starts bobbing, and what does he say?

Just one guess.