Name: Ursonate [Wir spielen, bis uns der Tod abholt]
Start: 2025-02-17
End: 2025-02-17
Location: Deutsches Theater Berlin - Saal

A Dada-ist Spoken Opera

Dada artist, poet, composer and commercial artist Kurt Schwitters worked meticulously for nine years (1923 - 1932) on his sound poem Ursonate, while the crises of the modern world raged around him.

Veranstaltungen in Berlin: Ursonate [Wir spielen, bis uns der Tod abholt]

Although he followed the structure of a classical, four-movement sonata, he sorted his wild linguistic material into it and reshaped it into an anti-sonata - a playful deconstruction of bourgeois art. Schwitters thus liberated the ideologically appropriated language by reducing it to its original sounds in order to dissolve all semantic references and create new meaning through the atomisation of language.

And this absurd sound poetry with roaring, hissing and crowing was also a revolt for him and the beginning of something new. Vive la crise! Or in the words of the citizen scaremonger: Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu.

Unconventional and bizarre, anarchistic and devoid of meaning: collage art made of rubbish, labyrinthine grottos, an alphabet from behind, a sprawling private flat without an outside world, nonsense poems. Superstition and conventions taken ad absurdum to the point of absolute senselessness became the trademark of the Hanoverian Dada artist, poet, composer and commercial artist Kurt Schwitters.

His art was characterised by the aftershocks of the First World War, in which an unimagined destructive fury was unleashed. The war had shifted from the battlefield to people's minds.

With the war, the familiar world disintegrated into its fragments, all valid contexts of meaning lost their significance. A deep-rooted feeling of disorientation spread.

Art served Schwitters as a counter-world to the existing bourgeois society, as a bizarre anti-cosmos beyond established logic:

Merz art, as he labelled his own art. A syllable that he had cut out of the word for the commercial and private bank of the time. For him, Merz meant overcoming the opposites of world and art, sense and nonsense and the boundaries between the arts.

Buy ticket

Additional information

Participating artists

Kurt Schwitters (Autor/in)

Claudia Bauer

Mareike Beykirch

Moritz Kienemann

Jens Koch

Vanessa Loibl

Janek Maudrich

Lenz Moretti

Mathilda Switala