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)

Kiesler.29 30 According to some theories, the omission of Kiesler can be explained as Kassák’s expression of sympathy with Jacob Levy Moreno, the founder of psychodrama, who accused Kiesler of plagiarism at the vernissage of the International Exhibition of New Theatre Techniques. Levy Moreno claimed that his ideas had been incorporated by Kiesler into his works but Kiesler had not acknowledged this and presented the Raumbühne as his own creation.0 The notion that Kassák took Levy Moreno’s side is supported by the fact that in the following year, MA published his essay on Rögtönző színház [Improvised Theatre].31 However, the memoirs of the young poet Sándor Vajda, who joined Kassák’s circle in 1923, cast a different light on this supposition.32 Vajda writes that when Levy Moreno’s text was published in MA, Kassák was working almost exclusively on his autobiography Egy ember élete [The Life of a Man], and paid less attention to Viennese artistic life. It was in fact Vajda and Hans Suschny who ensured that the two theoretical texts-Josef Matthias Hauer on his “atonal music”33 and Levy Moreno on improvised theatre - were published in the journal.34

FURTHER APPEARANCES OF THE IDEA OF MECHANICAL THEATRE IN MA

If we take into consideration the special issue’s publications and the texts published earlier in MA on constructivist mechanical theatre - writings by Farkas Molnár and Pál Sánta35-we can see that Kassák was interested in those theories which dealt with creating theatrical space and acting methods that had never been experienced before. Sánta was also critical towards the new experiments: although the works had moved away from Naturalism, the new

29 See, e.g., Veronika Darida, Színházutópiák [Theatre utopias], Kijárat, Budapest, 2010, 247. Rita Nemes, Raumstationen, op. cit., 87-100.

30 On this, see Barbara Lesák-Thomas Trabitsch (eds.), Frederick Kiesler, Theatervisionär- Architekt-Künstler [Frederick Kiesler, Theatre visionary-architect-artist], Österreichische Thea- termuseum-Brandstätter, Vienna, 2012, 39.

31 Jacob Levy Moreno, Rögtönző színház-Théatre Immediat [Improvised theatre], MA, 10/1., 1925, [4.]

32 Sándor Vajda, Untitled Autobiography, unpublished manuscript, [first half of the 1970s], MTA-Lukács Archives, Budapest. Dossier 4—5., 49-60. For more details, see Barbara Lesák, Die Kulisse explodiert, op. cit., 160.

33 Josef Matthias Hauer, Atonális zene [Atonal music], MA, 9/5., 1924, 5-6. Originally published in Die Musik, 16/2., 1923,103-106.

34 For more details, see Judit Galácz-Merse Pál Szeredi, Parallel Avant-Gardes in Vienna, A Report on the Lack of Cooperation between Kassák and Kiesler, in Peter Bogner-Gerd Zillner (eds.), Frederick Kiesler, Face to Face with the Avant-garde, Essays on Network and Impact, Birkhäuser, Wien, 2018, [forthcoming.]

35 Farkas Molnár, A mechanikus színpad, op. cit., [6.] Pál Sánta, Az új dráma és új színpad [New drama and new stage], MA, 8/9-10., 1923, [5-6.]

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