CAFÉ DADA

On 5th February 1916, a group of young artists opened in Zürich the Cabaret Voltaire - a night club with cultural programme. In the next few months, the team of six tirelessly prepared unusual recitals, dance and music performances and exhibitions, thus uncompromisingly attacking the existing culture and social order. They were inventors, fools, revolutionaries and unadjusted dreamers.

Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Jean Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janco started what is today considered a foundation for the subsequent European avantgarde - primarily surrealism. Even if only for a short time, the small cafe in Spiegelgasse became a place of artistic freedom and invention. The First World War was "the final straw of social anomalities" and the end of civilisation as we know it. With disrespect and absurditiy, the dadaists designed a call for a new world and a new man. They cut up the world and re-composed it into a poem.

Cabaret Voltaire in Ljubljana is a place of entertainment, freedom and memory. Café Dada is a gallery, a bar and a theatre combined.