A scene from the performance
Teatr ósmego dnia travels to the major performing-arts festival in Chile, with its monumental anti-war piece. The visionary open-air production by Poland’s legendary alternative theatre is a telling story of motherhood in the time of war.
Czas Matek / The Time of Mothers premiered in 2006, 50 years after brutal events it portrays took place in the western city of Poznań. The Poznan June of 1956 became a bloodbath when the Polish communist regime ordered security forces to fire on hundreds of factory employees and civilians demanding better work conditions. The death toll is estimated at between 57 and over a hundred people, including a 13-year-old boy. In the production by Teatr ósmego dnia, audiences witness contemporary and historic women, the mothers of children who die on the front. Their fate is a tragic vision of motherhood, and the protagonists protest against this. The artists of Teatr ósmego dnia declare:
The grandmothers from Buenos Aires fight to find their grandchildren, the mothers of American soldiers don’t want to save the world at the price of their sons’ lives, Chechen women fight for their biological survival, and Russian mothers unite against the Chechnyan war. The women of Israel stand side by side with the mothers of Palestine suicide bombers, the women of Iraq and Afganistan. The women stand on the side of life, against this loss.
Following the premiere in Poznań seven years ago, Elżbieta Kalemba-Kasprzak wrote an enthusiastic review for the Teatr magazine.
This spectacle gives up employing any text. We are thus presented only with images - both on the live plane, and in the form of video projections - movement, sound, music and light. [...] The large mother-earth, whose huge skirt hides the work that goes on underneath it: a huge forge has a mythical god-black smith hammer out strange plate armour for the stomachs and breasts. An orgy of armoured bellies and multiplied feeding breasts… [...] And thus, the audience witness the coming to life of a community of mothers who unite against the folly of the world.
The final scene of the performance depicts the meeting of mothers from opposite sides of a battle barricade.
Since its premiere in 2006, the production has been interpreted as a tragic history of mothers of victims in June 1956 in Poznań. The audience in Chile may read the performance in the context of the Pinochet regime in their own recent history. Teatr ósmego dnia performed in Chile in 2008, when they staged their Arka / The Arka, dedicated to nomadic emmigrants across the world. Following its staging at the Constitution Square, it stirred debate and controversy in the Chilian press.
Ewa Wójciak, the director of the troupe and one of its performers, explained in interviews for El Mercurio and La Tercera journals:
The political history of countries such as Argentina and Chile was always close, because of the many similiarities in our experience. In the Time of the Mothers perfomance there is a scene which symbolically depicts mothers holding huge photographs of lost sons and husbands. When we were making the Ark performance, we drew inspiration from the Balkan wars and the Chechnyan conflict. We dedicate our performance to all those who have lost their home country and are searching for a new promised land.
Czas Matek is presented from the 16th to the 19th of January 2013 at the Museo de la Memoria, as part of the Santiago a Mil festival. The festival is one of Chile’s major cultural showcases, organised annually since 1994. Last year, Santiago a Mil hosted performances of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Oczyszczeni (Cleansed), based on the text by Sarah Kane.
Editor: SRS
Source: press release