Hugo Ball

German author Hugo Ball (1886–1927) was a pioneer of Dadaism and sound poetry. He founded the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 in Zurich as a venue for Dadaistic events and experiments and produced a magazine of the same name. In the same year he also composed the first pure sound poems, which were devoid of any semantic meaning. Hugo Ball soon distanced himself from the Dadaist movement and in the 1920s turned to Catholic theology and mysticism.