Cabaret Voltaire (Zürich) in the context of "Tristan Tzara"

Emmy Hennings (born Emma Maria Cordsen, 17 January 1885 – 10 August 1948) was a German poet and performing artist, and co-founder of the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire with her second husband Hugo Ball.

Known as the "star of the show," Hennings has been the subject of numerous creative works, including a best-selling novel, a graphic novel, short films and various works of visual art. Family member Julian Schütt has commented on her eclipse and re-emergence as a central artistic figure of the early twentieth century: "Suddenly my great-grandmother is on YouTube – although for a long time she was only considered an ecstatic groupie"

New York Dada was a regionalized extension of Dada, an artistic and cultural movement between the years 1913 and 1923. Usually considered to have been instigated by Marcel Duchamp's Fountain exhibited at the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, and becoming a movement at the Cabaret Voltaire in February, 1916, in Zürich, the Dadaism as a loose network of artists spread across Europe and other countries, with New York becoming the primary center of Dada in the United States. The very word Dada is notoriously difficult to define and its origins are disputed, particularly amongst the Dadaists themselves.

The Dada movement has had continuous reverberations in New York art culture and in the art world generally ever since its inception, and it was a major influence on the New York School and Pop Art. Nevertheless, any attempt to articulate solid links between Dada and these movements must be tenuous at best. Such an attempt must begin philosophically with an acknowledgement of the Dadaists' demand to create a new world and artistically with an examination of the techniques the Dadaists used to do so.