Chapter Four

            Chapter four by Goldberg essentially explores the transition from Dada performance to Surrealist performance. The author focuses on the crumbling framework within Dada during its last years in Paris, and how this paved the way for a new movement of art and performance, known as Surrealism. The author seems to put a lot of focus on the tense relationships between some of the members of both movements, particularly between Picabia, Tzara, and Breton (p. 87). Picabia and Satie presented their ballet, Relache, as a sort of retaliation against the Surrealists (p. 90). Relache, in a sense, was a success in that it “…had broken the watertight compartment separating ballet from music hall (p. 95).” However, Relache did not affect the Surrealists and their own successes.   Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac founded the Theatre Alfred Jarry, in memory of Alfred Jarry, “innovator to ‘return to the theater that total liberty which exists in music, poetry, or painting, and of which it has been curiously bereft up to now (p. 95).’” In the Theater Alfred Jarry, Artaud presented his Le Jet de Sang, which reflected memory and the dream world that the Surrealists were obsessed with (p. 96). This performance, among others, “…was to affect most strongly the world of the theater with its concentration on language, rather than subsequent performance art (p. 96).”