The Chorus of Women addresses issues of contemporary stereotypes women face by tackling issues regarding femininity in pop-culture using colloquial speech, advertizing slogans, recipes, film quotes, fairy tales and more. The Chorus features only women, using their vocal talents to restore the repressed voices of their fellow women and bring to life social images of life in Poland to international audiences.
The show is directed by Marta Górnicka, who, since 2009, has been directing the Chorus of Women for the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre and creating an auteur form of chorus theatre. Ms. Górnicka focuses on a modern tragic chorus that undermines linguistic clichés and thus reveals the idealogical dimension of language.
“The modern drama broke up with the chorus, thus depriving itself of a certain dimension of the tragic. We must restore the chorus to the stage and find new forms of its theatrical presence; we have to restore women to the chorus. The chorus of women will shout, whisper and sing. It will treat works as music. It will change language into voice, it will initiate its subversive force,” explains Ms. Górnicka, referencing her innovations in vocal theatre.
The “Chorus of Women: This is the Chorus Speaking” project started in 2009 with an open casting call for women of all ages, regardless of their theatrical or vocal experience and twenty-eight women were selected out of 130 candidates. The project has received rave reviews in Poland and was deemed one of the ten most interesting events from the cultural programme of the Polish EU Presidency by the daily “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
The German website nachtcritic.de wrote in April 2011:
Marta Górnicka’s "Chorus of Women" is a true discovery and probably a turning point of Polish theatre. 28 different women of different ages and backgrounds speak in chorus, first about good recipes and good men, and then this wonderful choral voice takes on images of women in consumer society, forced acts aimed at achieving these ideals of beauty and doubting them. […] The last word – metoikas – refers to Antigone and her treatment as an alien deprived of her rights in her own country. A truly strong and thrilling spectacle.
The Polish Ambassador in Japan, Ms. Jadwiga Rodowicz-Czechowska attended the last showing on the 6th of October. She commented on the performance:
The Chorus of Women is like a phenomenon. The most powerful thing about this performance is the fact that the women are of different ages, and that they are not professional singers. The older participants sing in an excellent way, and with a certain kind of a distance which is rare among the young. At times the performance sounded a little like shouting out slogans. What it somehow lacked was the free voice and speech of a woman. The whole thing is about men taking over the space where the voice of women could emerge. The Chorus demands to win back this space. But it fails to take up the opportunity and let the figure of a liberated woman emerge. It lacks this word of its own, this proper speech of a woman
The Chorus of Women stirred great interest among the Japanese audience. The aftertalks which followed the performances ran well into the night hours. The Tokyo audience admired the beauty and courage of Polish women.
Project participants include:
Maniucha Bikont, Justyna Chaberek, Finka Heynemann, Alicja Herod, Anna Jagłowska, Marta Jasińska, Katarzyna Jaźnicka, Ewa Kossak, Katarzyna Lalik, Aleksandra Krzaklewska, Aleksandra Matryba, Kamila Michalska, Paulina Pacia, Marta Ponichter, Anna Rusiecka, Monika Sadkowska, Karolina Szulejewska, Anna Stachowicz, Kaja Stępkowska, Olga Szymula and Iwona Tołbińska.
The show was staged in Kiev on the 3rd and 4th of September and, after Tokyo, will be shown in Berlin at the Hebbel am Ufer Theatre in November 2011.
Date: 4th - 6th of October 2011
Venue: Theatre-X, 10-14 Ryogoku 2-chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo
Organizedby: Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute
This project is cofinanced by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.