The rehearsals for Mother Courage Won’t Remain Silent: A Chorus for Wartime, Marta Górnicka’s new première, took place on the premises of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. It features a 60-member choir of Arabian and Jewish mothers, Israeli dancer-soldiers and Arabian children. “At the rehearsals, they cry as if they were singing and sing as if they were crying”, said the director about the choir. “Will the war as a ‘business’ be reproduced endlessly? Am I not ‘human enough'”? asks one of the mothers. “Who is ‘more human’: an Arab or a Jew? As long as we see a human being in each other, it is one and the only way to stop the madness”, asks Robi Damelin, an Arabian mother.
Mother Courage Won’t Remain Silent is a choir of two languages (Arabic and Hebrew) and one voice. Marta Górnicka, author of a widely appreciated new form of choral theatre, moves her explorations into the sphere of specifically conceived social direction in this project. She invites the diametrically opposed groups to take part in her performance and works with them to create an opportunity for those who are separated from each other by an invisible barrier on a daily basis to meet.
It’s no longer about reproducing the conflict and the mechanism of its growth on stage, but instead revealing its whole intensity and deadly collisions. And to find, nonetheless, an opportunity to create a collective work, which will speak many languages and at the same time one human voice. A choir created in such way gives a chance to convert deadly antagonisms into an antagonism revealed on stage, it allows people to stand together by the very fact of their joint work, those who are divided by irreducible differences but still recognize the legitimacy of those defined by politics as ‘enemies'.
It’s therefore also about posing a radical question about the social effectiveness of art towards the most difficult challenges of the contemporary world. And thus, to make an effort to make art a tool of transcending the hostile attitudes constantly arising in societies. – says the director, who also asks “who is Mother Courage today. Who is a woman inside the system of conflict and war?”
In a place where one of the most violent conflicts is being waged, the choir will speak: the words will sound like missiles, singing and children songs. The choir will speak against the images of the 'conflict’, the ‘other’ and the ‘enemy’ that arise in the appropriated language. In the surreal world of war, where violence is framed, it’s not known what is ‘violence’ and what is ‘defence’, what is ‘endangered life’ and what is ‘worthy life’, what is an ‘act of terror’ and what is a defence against that act, who is a ‘friend’ and who is an ‘enemy’ – we can read in the press materials.
The performance launches a promotional campaign for Polish theatre abroad associated with the celebration of 250 years of public theatre in Poland. Its premier took place on 11th December.
Source: press materials, ed. AL, transl. szm, December 2014