Surrealism was an artistic movement with a strong political component, Surrealism was the most highly organized and tightly controlled artistic movement in this century, and its moral and executive leader was AndrT Breton, given the unofficial title of the Pope of Surrealism. Surrealism was also a life-style and a philosophical outlook that infused artistic expression, political action, and social life:
At the heart of Surrealism lay the belief that "objective chance"--by which was meant inexplicable coincidence--is central to reality, which is not an orderly system of events apprehensible by logical thought. Hence, it was believed, knowledge of true reality can be gained only through a-logical insights of the unconscious mind and these insights can only be achieved by certain (a-logical) automatic procedures (Osborne 529).
Dada emerged after the beginning of World War I, and the fantastic was unleashed in art in contrast to the reality of the war, a reality which included destructive drives and international tensions on a grand scale. The Dada artists proclaimed the uselessness of social action and thus broke with the Futurists, and this reflected the feelings associated with the war, viewed as a monstrous charade (Hunter and Jacobus 167).
Luigi Pirandello and Elizabeth LeCompte show aspects of both surrealist theory and Dadaism in their works, primarily in their emphasis on "objective chance" and in their reliance on the fantastic. Pirandello had developed a theory of the theater by the middle of his career by which he saw theater as a "second-rate art form, only the imitation of an original work of art that loses its essential character, its substance, through being transposed onto the stage" (Matthaei 19). He managed to overcome this view with a series of grotesque plays and with a new emphasis on a new kind of theater, one that countered the old bourgeois drama and so hailed a new modernism:
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