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)

director had created neither drama nor a unified stage, but rather followed his own ideas about drama and brought a work into being on this basis. Molnár responded to this in defence of the Bauhaus mechanical theatre experiments. The aim of mechanical theatre was to provide a scene-space experience for the viewer, which “consists of architectonically formed space and colour phenomena, where man, present in perfect balance and coordinated into the space, provides a unified Gesamtkunstwerk phenomenon”.36 Although Mol- nár’s study was not reproduced in the 1924 special issue, a scene he described from Georg Teltscher and Kurt Schmidt’s Mechanisches Ballett [Mechanical Ballet] was published as an illustration in the MA “Music and Theatre Special issue”.37

Bearing in mind Kassák’s earlier views on theatre, we may suppose that he was sympathetic towards Levy Moreno’s model of theatre and the related transformation of theatrical space, which envisioned a practice in which the boundary between stage and audience would disappear, and in which even the roles could disappear: members of the audience become actors, and the actors become viewers.

The works and conceptual editing specifically for a Hungarian audience in the MA “Music and Theatre Special issue” outlined here elucidate the range of ideas on avant-garde theatre in the 1920s. This living international discourse was joined by Lajos Kassák, who organised his ideas on the principles of the new theatre so that they could later impact endeavours in Hungary too.

36 Farkas Molnár, A mechanikus színpad, op. cit., [6.]

37 Kurt Schmidt-Georg Teltscher, Figurine des Mechanisches Balletts [Figures of the Mechanical Ballet], MA, ‘‘Music and Theatre Special issue", 9/8-9., 1924, [12.]

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