This chapter reads the audio and visual innovations that stemmed from Italian Futurist poetry and late German Expressionist performance, which burst upon the first audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire (the rowdy neighbour to Lenin’s lodging room in Zurich, before he returned to Russia in early 1917) and Dada soirées, in logical continuation of currents of poetic intervention that found their apogee in Hugo Ball’s sound poetry and poems without words of 1916. The historical context of the politicised fermentation of artistic activity in Germany specifically in the years leading up to 1916, and is presented here in rigorous detail as ground for the Dada activities that are discussed in the chapters that follow.