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The Gas Heart (Le Cœur à gaz) is a French-language Dadaist play by Romanian-born author Tristan Tzara. It was written as a series of non sequiturs and a parody of classical drama—it has three acts despite being short enough to qualify as a one-act play. The Gas Heart was first staged by the Paris Dadaists on 6 June 1921 as part of a Dada Salon at the Galerie Montaigne.

Dramatic form
Tzara called The Gas Heart the "greatest three-act hoax of the century" and suggested that it would "satisfy only industrialized imebiciles who believe in men of genius". The play offers, he continues, "no technical innovation." David Graver, however, describes The Gas Heart, along with Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes's The Mute Canary (first performed in 1920), as "manifestations of dada at its most extreme" that "pulverize the elements of conventional theater they use so finely that few gestures or remarks cohere in any recognizable order" and that "reduce theatrical spectacle to a kind of white sound, the significance of which depends almost exclusively upon the cultural context in which it is presented."

The play takes the form of a dialogue between characters who are personifications of human body parts: Mouth, Ear, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow. According to Peter Nichols, a visual clue to the characters' one-dimensionality was provided by the cardboard costumes that artist Sonia Delaunay designed for the play's re-staging. Nichols also writes that as Eye courts Mouth, some of the exchanges in the background turn from nonsense to "a more lyrical expression of desire." This courtship, Nichols proposes, may explain the title of the play as an allusion to "the power of love as a kind of life-force". Michael Corvin notes that the position of characters as specified by Tzara—alternating between an extreme height above the audience or episodes of collapsing on stage—is an index of the characters' relationships with one another, in particular the tribulations of their love affairs.

The play features a series of apparently metaphysical observations that characters make about themselves or about unspecified third parties. For example, Mouth states: "Everyone does not know me. I am alone here in my wardrobe and the mirror is blank when I look at myself." When Ear compares herself to a "prize horse" it eventually produces a metamorphosis, as a result of which she becomes a horse named Clytemnestra (after the femme fatale character in Greek myths). Another line reads: "The void drinks the void: air was born with blue eyes, that's why it endlessly swallows aspirin."

A series of dance routines that Claude Schumacher has described as "bewildering ballets" accompany the dialogue, including one performed in the third act by a man fallen from a funnel that, Enoch Brater argues, shares characteristics with Alfred Jarry's "ubuesque" situations.

Tzara's original text culminates in doodles, which are either various spellings of the same letters or drawings of hearts pierced by arrows. At this point, as Brater writes, "the dramatic genre seems to have broken down completely."

Production history
The Gas Heart was first staged as part of a Dada Salon at the Galerie Montaigne by the Paris Dadaists on 6 June 1921. Tzara himself played the Eyebrow, with Philippe Soupault as the Ear, Théodore Fraenkel as the Nose, Benjamin Péret as the Neck, Louis Aragon as the Eye, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes as the Mouth. The production was received with howls of derision and the audience began to leave while the performance was still in progress.

It was re-staged two years later, opening on 6 July 1923 at the Théâtre Michel, in a more professional production with designers and a full crew of technicians—though Tzara neither directed nor acted in this performance. Sonia Delaunay designed and costumed the production, providing striking trapezoid costumes of thick cardboard whose angular fragmentation recalled Pablo Picasso's designs for Parade, but which rendered the body two-dimensional and immobile. The play formed part of the show Evening of the Bearded Heart, which was connected to an art manifesto of the same name. The re-staging coincided with a major split in the avant-garde movement. Known for being one of the founders of the anti-art and anti-establishment movement Dadaism, Tzara was involved in a conflict that split the movement, which in 1924 led his rivals to establish Surrealism. Opposing his dada principles to the dissident wing of dada, represented by André Breton and Francis Picabia, he rallied around him a group of modernist intellectuals who endorsed his art manifesto. The conflict between Tzara and Breton culminated in a riot, which took place during the re-staging of The Gas Heart.

In Hungary the expressionist theatre company of Ödön Palasovszky staged the play as early as the 1920s, in a Hungarian-language translation by Endre Gáspár. In 1930, Tzara produced and directed the film The Bearded Heart, which starred some of the original show's main protagonists.

1923 riot
The collaboration between André Breton and Tzara, begun during the late 1910s, degenerated into conflict after 1921. Breton, who objected to Tzara's style of performance art and the Dada excursion to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, was also reportedly upset by the Romanian's refusal to take seriously the movement's informal prosecution of reactionary author Maurice Barrès. A third position, oscillating between Tzara and Breton, was held by Francis Picabia, who expected Dada to continue on the path of nihilism. The first clash between the three factions took place in March 1922, when Breton convened the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit, which rallied major figures associated with the modernist and avant-garde movements. Attended by Tzara only in order to ridicule it, the conference was used by Breton as a platform for attacking his Romanian colleague.

In reaction to this, Tzara issued the art manifesto The Bearded Heart, which was signed by, among others, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp, Vicente Huidobro, Ossip Zadkine, Erik Satie, Jean Metzinger, Paul Dermée, Serge Charchoune, Benjamin Péret, Marcel Herrand, Clément Pansaers, Raymond Radiguet, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Cécile Sauvage, Léopold Survage, Marcelle Meyer, Emmanuel Fay, Ilia Zdanevich, Simon Mondzain, and Roch Grey.

Tzara celebrated the formation of this new group with a Dada show, Evening of the Bearded Heart, at the Théâtre Michel on 6 July 1923. According to Steven Whiting, Tzara "cast his net too widely. The programme was a volatile hodge-podge of ex-Dada, pre-Dada and anti-Dada". In addition to Tzara's play, the event featured music by Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky, films by Man Ray, Charles Sheeler and Hans Richter, as well as another play by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (Blow Your Noses). There were also readings from the writings of Herrand, Zdanevich, Cocteau and Philippe Soupault, as well as exhibits of design works by Sonia Delaunay and Doesburg. Whiting notes that controversy erupted when Soupault and Éluard found their writings "being read in the same event as those of Cocteau", and that no explanation was provided for presenting works by Auric, "in view of his alliance with Breton." He also recounts that Satie unsuccessfully sought to make Tzara reconsider the choice for musical numbers weeks before the premiere.

André Breton "hoisted himself on the stage and started to belabor the actors" soon after The Gas Heart began, which, according to a first-hand witness, the poet Georges Hugnet, provoked the riot. Hugnet describes how the actors could not run away because of their restricting costumes, while their attacker also managed to assault some of the writers present, punching René Crevel and breaking Pierre de Massot's arm with his walking stick. Despite having previously shown a measure of solidarity with Tzara, Péret and his fellow writer Éluard are reported to have helped Breton cause more of a disturbance, breaking several lamps before the Préfecture de Police forces could intervene. Hugnet recounts: "I can still hear the director of Théâtre Michel, tearing his hair at the sights of the rows of seats hanging loose or torn open and the devastated stage, and lamenting 'My lovely little theater!'"

Art historian Michael C. FitzGerald argues that the violence was sparked by Breton's indignation over Masson having condemned Spanish painter Pablo Picasso in the name of Dada. Reportedly, Masson's speech also included denunciations of André Gide, Duchamp and Picabia, to which, FitzGerald notes, "no one took offense." FitzGerald also recounts that, after breaking Masson's arm, Breton returned to his seat, that the audience was subsequently ready to assail him and his group, and that an actual brawl was averted only because "Tristan Tzara alerted the waiting police". According to Whiting the scuffles "continued outside the theatre after the lights were snuffed". Tzara unsuccessfully sought to have Éluard sued, while the theatre refused to host any more performances.

Legacy
Hans Richter—who contributed to the 1923 show—described it as "Dada's swan song." Whiting writes that the same production "drove the last nail into the coffin of the movement that Cocteau had all too aptly characterized as 'le Suicide-Club'." The Gas Heart endures as one of the most notable of Tzara's writings, however, as of Dada's theatrical experiments in general. While "few Dada plays survive", D. J. R. Bruckner argues, "this one is exquisite."

Enoch Brater suggests that although Tzara's play shares a number of motifs with Not I, a 1972 monodrama by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, the latter is more accomplished and different in tone and that The Gas Heart is one of several "parodies of theatrical conventions rather than significant breakthroughs in the development of a new dramatic form."