German premier

Dadaism originated after 1916 as a counter-movement to the existing academic/bourgeois art and summarised a new lifestyle. It led away from orderly rules, from disciplined form, from profound content and created a comical art form of irrationalness and of the sheer joy of play for play’s sake. Baby talk, Dada, lent its name to the convenient concept of Dadaism. The Neo-Dadaism of the 1950s and 1960s seized the imagination of the world and fascinated it right up to present times.

Singers, actors and musicians met to return Dadaism to the contemporary stage. They created an explosive musical in which proximity, spontaneity, culture, nonet, absurdity, comedy and fantasy join in a delightful melange. The music carries the evening; its synchronised harmony and its vibrant resonance are far more than just a simple appendage, or interruption, of the spoken word.

Jiří Cerha was born 1943 in Prague. He studied composition and arrangement at the conservatory and founded the C. K. Vocal Choir. His large number of choir compositions were recorded on five records. Cerha sang on the Theatre Semafor and wrote a large number of stage compositions for theatres as well as for films. Last year he started his endeavours as composer and music dramatist at the Prague Realistic Theatre, a stage which in 1992 under a new doctrine was renamed Divadlo Labyrint (Theatre Labyrinth).