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)

Judit Galácz

AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTS COMMITTED TO PAPER - THE MA “MUSIC AND THEATRE SPECIAL ISSUE" (1924)

In 1915, Lajos Kassák launched his first journal A Tett [The Action], which already included short reviews of Budapest theatre performances. Oneyear later A Tett was banned, but that sameyear, Kassák launched a newjournal entitled MA [Today], and continued to maintain that alongside fine arts and literary themes, his journal should also cover theatre. After the tentative experiments of its first year, from 1917 onwards, alongside theatre reviews, theoretical texts on dramatic art as well as dramaturgies (the theory and practice of dramatic composition) started appearing within the pages of MA with increasing frequency.

With MA’s interest in theatre, Kassák joined the editorial practice of similar avant-garde journals, but he was not driven merely by the cultural tendencies of the era. In the 1910s and 1920s, the significance of theatre and its openness and commitment to social questions were self-evident for the public and artists too. In the early 20th century, theatre modernisers in Hungary experimented in two characteristic directions: they brought new social layers into the process of creation (such as workers’ plays), and consciously aimed at a radical transformation of the traditional performance style and theatrical spectacle. They wanted to reform theatrical space, bring an end to the alienated forms of theatrical drama, and do away with the strict boundaries between stage and audience.

JÁNOS MÁCZA’S THEORY OF THEATRE

During MA's Buda pest years between 1916 and 1919, the artists who gathered around the journal wanted to rethink the traditional practices of theatrical creation. The journal’s views and ground-breaking ideas on theatre were defined during this period by the activities of János Mácza, who published theoretical writings in MA as its theatre expert, and popularised topical questions on the modernisation of theatre in his lectures organized by the free school of MA. At the end of the 1910s, he published two significant texts, Új dráma, új színpad, A színpad megújhodását váró keveseknek [New Drama, New Stage, For the few who want to reform theatre] in 1917,1 and Teljes színpad [Total Stage] in

1 János Mácza, Új dráma, új színpad, A színpad megújhodását váró keveseknek [New drama, New stage, For the few who want to reform theatre], MA, 2/11., 1917,167-169.

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