Marie Osmond and Dada

Reading the novel Flametti by Hugo Ball, soon to be published in English for the first time. It's a fascinating period piece about a ramshackle theatre troupe performing in neutral Switzerland during the Great War.

Ball, a German poet resident in Zurich, was co-founder (with Tristan Tzara) of the Dada movement and performed on stage at the short-lived Cabaret Voltaire. This place was the Burgess Shale of modernist performance art - and its cultural impact is still with us, all the time, for good or ill.

Of all the strange things to be found on the internet this, I think, is the strangest: Marie Osmond (of the Osmond Family) delivering one of Ball's trailblazing sound poems straight to camera (and doing it really well). It's like seeing Jimmy Tarbuck read passages from Finnegans Wake (and doing it really well).

Watch it here