Hugo Ball and the Lobster Bishop

Hugo Ball studied drama under Max Reinhardt. He tried to enlist in the German army three times in 1914. He was a serious man with serious ambitions.

Then he built himself a lobster costume out of cardboard.

On 23 June 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Ball took the stage wearing blue cardboard tubes on his legs, a gold and scarlet collar, and enormous lobster-claw hands. On his head sat a towering cylindrical hat. He could not move his arms. He could barely walk. He began reciting "Karawane," a poem composed entirely of invented words, sounds with no meaning in any language on earth.

And something went wrong. Or possibly very right.

Partway through, Ball's voice shifted without his permission. The nonsense syllables locked into a rhythm he hadn't chosen: the cadences of Catholic mass, rising from a childhood he thought he'd left behind. He entered a kind of trance. The man who had set out to destroy language found himself chanting like a medieval priest. One imagines the audience did not know where to look.

He had to be carried off the stage. "Covered in sweat," he wrote later, "like a magic bishop."

Within four years, Ball quit Dada entirely and returned to the Catholic Church. He spent his remaining years writing about early Christian saints.

The ancient rhythms, it turned out, had not been kidding.