25xXXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: This is the Chorus Speaking: Only 6 to 8 Hours, Only 6 to 8 Hours… | Article | Culture.pl

25xXXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: This is the Chorus Speaking: Only 6 to 8 Hours, Only 6 to 8 Hours…

chor_kobiet_5_5981389.jpg, default, 'This is the Chorus Speaking', dir. Marta Górnicka photo: Antonio Ernesto Galdamez Muñoz, Witold Meysztowicz

#performing arts

The premiere of This is Chorus Speaking (Tu mówi Chór) came as a breath of fresh air. Riding the wave of this success, Marta Górnicka began refining her working method – and the feminised, politicised reinvention of the ancient chorus. The production set off on an international tour, scooping up awards for its originality, energy and its unmistakable force.

The Women’s Choir project began on 1st December 2009, as part of the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute’s ‘New Theatre Station’, a programme supporting young, exploratory artists. Its initiator was Marta Górnicka (b. 1975), a director, vocalist and actor, a graduate of the directing department of Warsaw’s Theatre Academy and, earlier, the Warsaw’s Chopin Music School. By then, Górnicka had long been using artistic tools to probe the organic voice of women. From 130 applications she selected 28 performers for the first Women’s Choir show, This is the Chorus Speaking: Only 6 to 8 Hours, Only 6 to 8 Hours…

The casting was open to professionals and amateurs alike; age, background or stage experience were irrelevant. As critic Aneta Kyzioł observed, the participants ‘differ in age and life experience, but share womanhood – and the difficulty of defining it in ways that do not tumble into stereotype’. From January 2010, they underwent movement and voice training based on Górnicka’s own method, seeking a form for a postmodernist chorus theatre. Choreography was done by Anna Godowska, with from . The costumes and set design were created by Maja Wolak (Skrzypek) and Anna Maria Karczmarska, and Agnieszka Symela provided consultation on conducting.

Górnicka’s innovative concept was perfectly timed. In 2009, Warsaw had hosted the first Congress of Women, which brought together more than 4,000 participants to debate women’s contribution to the two decades of post-communist transformation. Philosopher and feminist Magdalena Środa – formerly the government’s representative for equal status of women and men (2004-2005) – described the Congress as a moment when Polish women, previously scattered, decided to act for one another: ‘Something must have shifted in the social structure, in our mentality, in our sense of justice.” Yet this collective jolt hardly resonated with the country’s politically demobilised public sphere, lulled into a sweet neoliberal dream under the rule of Donald Tusk and the Civic Platform (2007–14), during which feminist and reproductive rights were consistently sidelined. Abortion rights remained trapped by the so called ‘Abortion Compromise’ defined by the January 1993 Act, and the high point of public debate about women concerned equal pay, quotas and civil-law contracts.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'This is the Chorus Speaking', dir. Marta Górnicka photo: Antonio Ernesto Galdamez Muñoz, Witold Meysztowicz

Picture image

chor_kobiet_4_5981385.jpg

This collective jolt, however, was recognised by Górnicka who transposed it into her distinctive artistic language. In a country where visual artist Dorota Nieznalska – author of Passion – had finally been acquitted of offending religious feelings after a nine-year trial (2001–10), and which remained, in Kazimiera Szczuka’s words, ‘a land of Marian cults, abortion bans, and a market that was meant to liberate us’, the Women’s Choir became a performance of reclaiming agency. The speech freed from the shackles of patriarchy was immediately appropriated – for instance through the phonetic transcription of the project’s name: [’hu:r kobjət+]. According to Ewa Guderian-Czaplińska, the transcription emphasised the act of listening, focusing attention on who, where from, and what was being said – as opposed to the disembodied written form disciplined by orthography (and implicitly established by men). ‘The Women’s Choir’, wrote Inga Iwasiów, ‘draws openly on the feminist tradition of female groups created to voice what mainstream culture sidelines. the themes of the performances thus become issues such as violence, loneliness, motherhood, religion, and abortion”.

The performance was structured as a syncretic movement–voice score for a large ensemble. The cultural texts woven into the libretto might seem secondary to vocal and choreographic expression. Yet their selection of quotations was entirely deliberate: on the one hand, there were fragments of Sophocles’ Antigone and Moniuszko’s national opera Halka; on the second, excerpts from the writing of Simone de Beauvoir, Elfriede Jelinek, Judith Butler, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. It also included a recipe for babka cake from Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa’s iconic 19th-century cookbook; misogynistic advertising and press slogans; and finally references to pop culture – Lara Croft, the leitmotif from the intro to Walt Disney cartoons, and April Stevens’s Teach Me Tiger, among others. The meaning of phrases dissolved, blurred, hollowed through repetition and alteration by sound – their meaning revealing itself only through the full composition. They shared a common denominator: they crushed the cultural image of the ideal woman, an image saturated with stereotypes and excessive expectations.

‘Cheerful preschoolers, seductresses, dolls, Amazonians – you can mould any fantasy out of this mass of women’, wrote Joanna Derkaczew. The whole concept depended on contradictions that were impossible to reconcile yet essential to show: forging community while empowering individuals; working with dissent, affect and organic expression, yet performed within a precise script. The reception of the performance highlighted these various contradictions: ‘Vigorous, yet austerely scored. Ironic yet primal’, wrote Kazimiera Szczuka. ‘A chorus on the verge of disintegration and yet – as if convinced of its mission – performs a hymn to cohesion’, added Katarzyna Czeczot. Piotr Gruszczyński even concluded: “We see clearly that the choir is there and not there at the same time’.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'This is the Chorus Speaking', dir. Marta Górnicka photo: Antonio Ernesto Galdamez Muñoz, Witold Meysztowicz

Picture image

chor_kobiet_1_5981373.jpg

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, Iwona Tołbińska, Anna Turzyniecka, Agata Wencel, Karolina Więch and Anna Wojnarowska speak, whisper, yell, squeal, sing operatically or however they can; they harmonise, whimper, wail, inhale, tighten their throats, purse their lips, bare their teeth, hiss, chant, drawl, murmur, chirp. They never mince their words: they know what to say and they say it. I list their names, though perhaps I overstep; perhaps this contradicts choral unity and loyalty. The only name we are meant to remember is the director’s.

On an empty stage the women synchronously form ranks, rows, and groups; they lie down, shuffle into checkboard patterns – as if driven by an instinct for constant motion and perpetual shift. But they move on the cue of a visible conductor: Marta Górnicka. Her ostentatious presence in the auditorium (in the front row; in subsequent productions, eighth or tenth) raises the question of whether a functioning community is possible without hierarchy. Can emancipation be conducted? In this sense, the Women’s Choir reveals the limits of its own feminism – even in a project about freedom, the need for order persists. The paradox of Górnicka’s choir lies in its emancipatory charge emerging through an authoritarian structure. The question circles back like a boomerang: does collective action guarantee emancipation for all? And who is truly speaking when the choir speaks?

The premiere of This is the Chorus Speaking on 13th June 2010 came as a breath of fresh air. Theatre historian Joanna Krakowska placed the production among the most important performances of the early 21st century – works that challenged or played with gender norms and social roles. Riding the wave of this success, Marta Górnicka began refining her working method – and the feminised, politicised reinvention of the ancient chorus. The production set off on an international tour, scooping up awards for its innovation, energy and powerful message. A year later came MAGNIFICAT; then REQUIEMACHINE (2013), Mother Courage Will Not Be Silent: A Choir for Wartime (2014), Constitution for the Chorus of Poles (2016), Hymn to Love (2017), and most recently Mothers: A Song for Wartime (2023; the TV Theatre recording premiered February 2025). In 2015, Górnicka founded the Chorus of Women Foundation to support socially engaged theatre that crosses the boundaries of art, activism and education. In 2025 she received the ITI Germany Prize, awarded by the German Centre of the International Theatre Institute, for lifetime achievement.

Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute, Warsaw
Women’s Choir – This is the Chorus Speaking: Only 6 to 8 Hours, Only 6 to 8 Hours…
Direction, concept & libretto by Marta Górnicka
Choreography by Anna Godowska
Conducting consultation by Agnieszka Symela
Set design by Maja Skrzypek, Anna Maria Karczmarska
Literary collaboration with Agata Adamiecka
Premiere: 13th June 2010

Language English

polish theatre directors

polish performance art