La Mise en scène de soi : Tzara, l’avant et l’après

Abstract

Self-Staging: Tzara, Before and After. Hundred years after the birth of the Dada movement in Zürich, Tristan Tzara’s theatre is unjustly not as well known as his poetry or manifestos. Being himself a theatrical person, always staging his own personality as the leader of the Dadaists in Zürich and Paris, he refused to walk on already traced paths, in a similar way the medieval fools had done it in their search for the abolition of given rules and conventions. Turning upside down the traditional dramaturgical and staging patterns, Dadaist plays such as Mouchoir de nuages (Cloud Handkerchief) or Cœur à gaz (Gas Heart) leave behind a significant heritage if we think of surrealist performing arts and of the New Theatre of the 60’s, especially Eugène Ionesco’s and Samuel Beckett’s theatrical work. The present study focuses on how Tzara’s personality and work can be seen as part of the same genealogical theatrical line as the famous Shakespearian triad “the poet, the lunatic and the fool”, and which are the constants making of him not only an acrobat-poet (in the tradition of the antique mime and of the medieval fool), but also a path opener and a dramatic character in the history of the 20^th and 21^st century modern and postmodern literature.