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)

Phenomenon],17 which also discussed the disassembling of the stage to its foundations to rebuild it according to new principles. Here, the focus is on the outdated nature of traditional theatrical space and its reconstruction. It is as if Kassák wanted to present a new artistic form of building the new theatrical construction by graphically placing Walden's text and Kurt Schwitters's manifesto on the Merz-Stage next to one another,18 even if this possibility was wholly unusual and proffered an extreme solution. In Schwitters’ manifesto, we can recognise a Dadaist creation based on montage techniques, in which the fundamental organising force is the random placing of elements next to one another, thus excluding conscious planning from the work process.

The text by Russian director Alexander Tairov, A színpadi atmoszféra [The Stage Atmosphere],19 also fits into the Marinetti-Prampolini-Walen discourse. In his introduction to the special issue, Kassák had already mentioned Tairov's theatre work. He objected to the director’s excessive focus on the role of the actor, incorrectly turning him into an autocrat in the pieces, but praised Tairov’s experiments in organising space. Using a historical narrative of his own construction, Tairov deduces how designing the stage spectacle evolved from early maquette forms, via two-dimensional sketches, and back again to the maquette. We may regard this train of thought as one kind of practical summary of the three-dimensional experiments which Tairov carried out in his large stage productions. Tairov’s final conclusion was that the maquette can only be a suitable solution for spatial design if we learn to think in more dimensions, thus avoiding the traps of outdated naturalist design. Illustrating these experiments were photographs of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s works and stage designs. Just as Tairov and Meyerhold attempted to transform space along constructivist lines, Meyerhold also concentrated as a director on the spatial arrangement possibilities of human movement. This verifies Kassák's remark in his introduction on the inability of Soviet-Russian artists to fully create stage synthesis because they had not moved beyond this particular problem of the stage.

Although these Soviet-Russian artists undoubtedly influenced Kassák's thinking on theatre, the artists grouped around MA were more sympathetic

17 Herwarth Walden, Das Theater als künstlerisches Phänomen [The theatre as artistic phenomenon], Ibid., [4.] English translation in Timothy O. Benson-Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, op. cit, 448-449.

18 Kurt Schwitters, Die Merz-Bühne [The Merz-stage], Ibid., [4.] Originally published in Sturm-Bühne, 1/8., 1919,3. See also footnote 6.

19 Alexander Tairov, A színpadi atmoszféra [The stage atmosphere], Ibid., [5-6.] Originally published in Idem, Das entfesselte Theater [The unleashed theatre], Kiepenheuer, Potsdam, 1923,11.

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