“Our play speaks of women and war. About defence mechanisms, about responsibility. About our reaction to war in Europe. About the rites of wartime violence towards women and civilians that have always been the same.”

This is what Marta Górnicka says about her play. The originator of The Women’s Choir, which has travelled the breadth and width of Europe with its productions (notably with Tu Mówi Chór / This is the Chorus Speaking, Magnificat, and Requiemaszyna / Requiemachine), and founder of the Political Voice Institute at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre, has prepared another choral production that reacts to the events behind our eastern border. The whole is a joint work of 21 women from Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, who, singing and chanting together, tell the dramatic tales of mothers and children from Mariupol, Irpin, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, women fleeing from war and political persecution, and also the ones who opened their homes in Poland to them. The quest for the post-operatic voice of women makes direct references to antiquity, at the same time providing a heartrending community experience. It poses universal questions about wartime rituals of violence against women, unchanged in fact for centuries yet assuming even more brutal forms today. “When Ukraine screams, we need practices from long before theatre was born, which the CHÓR brings. We need theatre with its power to change. With its facility to remember the most horrifying events that the trauma of war would rather have erased from sight. We need theatre of new forms of solidarity and new ritual. A place where a better world is imaginable and feasible”, declares Marta Górnicka. For the past year, she has toured all around Europe, invariably provoking profound emotions. A de rigour play.

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Photos by Bartek Warzecha