Balázs Eszter: Art in action. Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum, 1915-1927 - The avant-garde and its journals 3. (Budapest, 2017)

Judit Galácz: Avant-Garde Experiments Committed to Paper - the MA “Music and Theatre Special Issue” (1924)

Mácza’s texts in MA emphasized two questions of the radical metamorphosis of theatre: transforming the interpretation of the genre of drama, and the problematics of theatricalism. Among the existing theatrical interpretations, it was primarily those that advocated a synthesis of balance between these two standpoints that came to the fore. Mácza was particularly affected by the Cesamtkunstwerk thinking of English director Edward Gordon Craig in the 1910s, and the expressionist theatre attitude towards raising social questions, which started in Germany and was greatly influential over European acting. Mácza believed that the characteristics of expressionist theatre - a mode of expression concentrating on inner emotions, and a puritanical world of form - could create a credible stage atmosphere, and thus theatre could move beyond traditional practices based on stylization and theatrical gestures, to become a form suited to the notions of the time.

In expressionist theatre, Mácza was interested in the cluster of problems arising from collective feeling, actors’ movements, and the possibilities of space. He thus turned towards Soviet mass theatre and, in the later version of Teljes színpad, wrote in appreciation of Constructivism and the theories of the greatest figures in Russian revolutionary theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov. In September 1917, Mácza and Kassák founded an acting school to present the theories committed to paper as performances to the public.4 The young artists around the school experimented with short, one-act performances, their actions reinforcing the progressive, community nature of the MA circle.

After the fall of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, Kassák and his colleagues had to exile from Hungary in 1920, and settled in Vienna, where they continued their theatre-related work, but with different emphases. Because they were marginalised in Vienna, they could no longer react directly to events in the world of Austrian theatre, and instead opened towards international avant-garde artistic circles. They organised performance evenings and matinees in Vienna, Berlin and Czechoslovakia, and under the influence of such international circles, Kassák modified his ideological notions on theatre.

4 According to the brief announcement in the weekly Színházi Élet [Theatrical life], the free school was opened under the direction of János Mácza to set up a studio ensemble (6/39., 1917, 45). Members of the company came from the group of artists gathered around Kassák’s journal. Not much is known for sure about this small group: they held their rehearsals among the Roman ruins in Aquincum in Buda, and their concepts of acting were dominated by Mácza's notions idealising the expressionist style. Their sole notable performance was held at the workers' club in Újpest in March 1919, where they performed Mácza’s one-act drama Individuum. Rózsa Kocsis, Igen és nem, op. cit., 169. Lajos Kassák, Egy ember élete [The Life of a Man], voi. II., Magvető, Budapest, 1983, 513.

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