playbill vip

Or What the Heck is Going on with the Set?

One of my go to strategies as a director is to choose a production metaphor, a piece of art that IS a representation of our production of the play. This grounds all of our designs through set, costumes, props, lights, and sound – helping us to work together to create a unified world.

For this production, we worked with Raoul Hausmann’s A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement (also known as Dada seigt or Dada Triumphs).

Dadaism was “an artistic and literary movement formed in response to the disasters of World War I (1914–18) and to an emerging modern media and machine culture. Dada artists sought to expose accepted and often repressive conventions of order and logic, favoring strategies of chance, spontaneity, and irreverence. Dada artists experimented with a range of mediums, from collage and photomontage to everyday objects and performance, exploding typical concepts of how art should be made and viewed and what materials could be used. An international movement born in neutral Zurich and New York, Dada rapidly spread to Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Paris, and beyond” (“Dada”).

Initially, I was drawn to the absurdism, collage elements, and found object art of Dada as a style that spoke to Puffs. After researching to remember the roots of this movement, it made even more sense. Dada was a response to the brutality of WW1 emerging from a group of artists whose subversive and revolutionary ideals led them to question and critique the world around them. As a parody of the world of a certain boy wizard (who shall not be named for fear of lawsuits), this play questions the author and directors; it lovingly celebrates and challenges their pop culture phenomenon. 

According to the MoMA, “Participants [in the movement] claimed various, often humorous definitions of Dada—’Dada is irony,’ ‘Dada is anti-art,’ ‘Dada will kick you in the behind’ – though the word itself is a nonsense utterance. As the story goes, the name Dada was either chosen at random by stabbing a knife into a dictionary, or consciously selected for a variety of connotations in different languages – French for ‘hobbyhorse’ or Russian for ‘yes, yes.’”

Hopefully, you’ll enjoy this absurdly silly story that collages together the world of … well, you know … with tons of 90s references which we then designed in an absurdly silly manner that collages together whatever we could throw on stage to respond to our "modern [social] media and [AI] machine culture" with as much randomness as we could throw at it.

“Dada.” MoMA, https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/dada. Accessed 18 November 2025.