Needless Alley Launches CABARET VOLTAIRE, June 7-9

Needless Alley presents its newest artistic venture, the Cabaret Voltaire. A celebration of the madness, grit and artistic excellence that is known today as Dada, Needless Alley has invited an array of artists, painters, poets, performance artists, singers and musicians to respond to material created during the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 Zurich - mainly poems, art work and stories about the endeavours of its protagonists - in a night of raucous and raw artistic behaviour.

From the pool of artists, the group will constantly develop and change the show each month, with three showings every four weeks, in a continuous exploration of the space, time and the source material. They will do it for as long as they continue to be inspired by this material and the world around them. Until their knees rot. Until people who have had enough of them want them back. Until their brains explode. Until Hugo Ball turns in his grave.

Needless Alley will kick proceedings off in June with three nights of physical performance, video installation, music, dance and life drawing explorations around the themes of ‘fear’, ‘birth and re-bith’, ‘recycling of the self’, ‘fake revolutionists’ and ‘displacement’.

The Cabaret Voltaire was a dingy room at the back of a pub in Zurich 1916 where artists of all backgrounds and nationalities, led by Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck, met in order to create a response to the problems the world was facing, particularly the consequences of the First World War, with a mixture of symbolist and expressionist poetry, radical art works and anarchic actions.

Taking such strong and raw material out of The Shadows of academia to a contemporary world, Needless Alley intends to explore the foundations that changed the course of art by putting them in a modern setting. What does Dada and its’ manifesto mean today? How do we approach art and how does it represent the world today?

This is an on-going project in collaboration with the Manchester School of Art’s Contemporary Art History department, with whom we just finished a residency. For more info log on to www.needlessalleycollective.tumblr.com.

RESIDENT ARTISTS: Needless Alley, Bobby Hirst, Saskia Solomons, Kristoffer Huball, Sarah Elliott, See-Saw Performance Group, John Bingham, Huey, Michael Underwood, Alexander Devrient, Foxy & Husk, Karine Rathle, Sam Hacking, Dominique Vannod & Michael Neo.

DIRECTED BY Cordelia Howard
PRODUCED BY Xavier de Sousa
DESIGNED BY Catherine Goodwin

DATES: 7th, 8th, 9th of June, 7.30pm

VENUE: The George Tavern, 373 Commercial Road, Aldgate East, E1 0LA

For more information, bookings or press queries, contact Xavier de Sousa on 07834278002 or info@needlessalley.co.uk, and find Needless Alley on Facebook: www.facebook.com/needlessalleycollective and Twitter: @needlessalley.

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