The lobby of the Yale University Art Gallery on Thurs., Feb. 25 didn’t buzz—it warbled like someone was blowing into a bottle and thumped like a techno club. As I walked in, I bumped into a woman with a basket of bagels on her head. The normally staid museum entrance was in full sensory swing by the time I arrived. The Dada Ball was underway.

Some immediately obvious features of the Dada Ball: a cheese sculpture shaped like a Jean Arp lithograph, green mocktails meant to resemble absinthe, a collective poem being passed around on an iPad, and a photo-booth where people of all ages were striking silly poses in bright costumes.

The event was entirely antithetical to my conception of museums (don’t touch, don’t talk too loud, don’t eat ice cream, definitely don’t dance). Which was, of course, the point. The Dada Ball was the opening event of the “Dada Un-Symposium,” a series of programs and performances that will take place over the next few months in conjunction with the YUAG’s new exhibit— Everything Is Dada.

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So what is Dada, besides everything? I posed this question to the curator, Frauke Josenhans, right before we entered the exhibit the day before the Dada Ball. She paused and laughed. “Well, it’s not a movement that is easy to define or explain. It’s full of contradiction, it’s playful and provocative, there’s visual shock, unusual materials,” Josenhans said.

The movement does have a defined beginning moment. Dada was started in 1916 in Switzerland, at a nightclub called Café Voltaire. Artists staged shocking performance art shows, featuring dance, music, spoken poetry, and puppetry, that aimed to break all the existing conventions of art. The movement spread. It was anti-authoritarian, experimental, sometimes political, sometimes simply playful. There is no defined endpoint to Dada, Josenhans told me; though its rise occurred in the ’20s and ’30s, it had a resurgence in the ’50s and ’60s. “And many artists today still use techniques and ideas that come from Dada,” she said.

So the YUAG exhibit isn’t ordered chronologically, but around sections that each highlight a different aspect of Dada. “Everything and Nothing is Art” focuses on the “anti-art” aspects of Dada, like the inclusion of found objects. Josenhans and I lingered in front of a delicate curved white sculpture. She pointed to the title: Lampshade. It was quite literally an unfurled lampshade, repurposed by American Dadaist Man Ray. The “Irreverence and Social Criticism” contains more political works, like George Grosz’ oil painting Inside and Outside, which depicts a harsh division between patrons of a fancy restaurant and shadowy figures outside. “Exploring the Subconscious” features dreamy, sexual drawings, and watercolors by Beatrice Wood, hidden behind a red curtain. In the “Sense and Nonsense” section, Jean Arp’s lithographs combine aspects of everyday objects. There is, for instance, “Mustache-clock” and “Navel-bottle.”

Perhaps the most striking section of the exhibit is “Dada is Design.” While the rest of the sections feature works from the YUAG’S collection, this specially-designed gallery space is something totally new. Christopher Sledoba, Director of Graphic Design, worked with Yale MFA students in the Graphic Design program to design this space. It has black walls covered in white font and drawings. There are word puzzles, and symbols. The word Dada snakes across the walls in new forms—with the big D of the Disney logo or hidden in the Hebrew letters of Yale’s crest. There are stacks of newspapers for the taking with headlines like “DADA ZOO” and “LANGUAGE LAUNDERING.” Two old-fashioned telephones play Dada sound poetry—a hodgepodge of nonsense sounds.

“We wanted the exhibit to be as interactive as possible,” Josenhans told me. “Dada was not just about the visual art, and I wanted to incorporate other elements as much as possible.” Near the entrance to the exhibit, behind a curtain, a selection of short, silent Dada films flicker in black and white.

This interactivity extends into the Dada Un-Symposium, a series of talks, lectures, and performances, and the brainchild of the YUAG’s Assistant Curator of Programs, Molleen Theodore. “When we thought about programming for Dada, which was planned very much in conjunction with the exhibit, the idea of a symposium with academic lectures didn’t totally fit,” Theodore said. “So we thought of the un-symposium, which calls to mind the idea of the scholarly approach and then totally upends it. In the end, though, I think it will provide a full and thorough examination of this movement, and its effects across the disciplines.”

Hence the Dada Ball.

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Perhaps the most exciting part of the Dada Ball was what was happening in the gallery. After my arrival, I discovered that the Ball wasn’t confined to the lobby. Upstairs in the gallery, a group of registrars posed next to the Jean Arp lithographs that they were dressed as. A woman wearing white face paint and cardboard collages glued all over her body told me that her costume was, “Absurdity.”

Warbling bubbly noises drifted through the gallery—something like underwater classical music. I assumed that there was a speaker somewhere, but when I peeked into the film room, I realized that the music was live. Hans Bilger, BR ’16, was playing the double bass and Gideon Broshy, CC ’17, was using synthesizers to improvise along with the score. People were drifting in and out, listening, absorbing, moving. Throughout the whole night, more than 500 people came through the exhibit.

In some ways, Dada can seem like a series of negations: an anti-art movement that rejects a defined ideology. Sometimes, maybe, Dada is nothing. But also, Dada is visual, sonic, tactile, participatory. So sometimes Dada is everything. And at the Dada Ball, it felt like a celebration.