Mothers: A Song for Wartime – Marta Górnicka | #performing arts

Mothers: A Song for Wartime – Marta Górnicka

A moving and primal experience achieved through frugal theatrical forms, ‘Mothers: A Song for Wartime’ tugs at the throat long after the applause has died down.

The performance begins with a shchedrivka, a type of Ukrainian song said to call forth spring. The literal translation is ‘swallow’, a bird traditionally associated with hope.

Before the solstice song can be heard, however, as we enter the auditorium, the collective body of the chorus is already waiting on stage – motionless and silent for now. We are also greeted by an inscription projected onto a large screen, a quote from Serhiy Zhadan: ‘Today we need only words that save lives’. Theses are the kinds of words, words which can make a difference and therefore even save someone’s life, that are then sung, chanted and shouted by a choir of twenty-one women – Ukrainian, Polish and Belarusian – expressing through their voices the silent cry of the often nameless victims of violence and rape brought on by the conflagration of war. These women have collectively gone through much – fleeing, suffering, crying, fighting, waiting or helping in silence, refugees from Irpin, Mariupol, Kyiv, Polish women who took them in, emigrants from authoritarian Belarus – but now they regain their voices through the choir. The choristers range in age from nine to seventy-one. Different professions, interests, lifestyles, there are mothers and grandmothers among them, there is a daughter. Dressed and styled differently, they speak and sing in different languages.

Mothers: A Song for Wartime, directed by Marta Górnicka – Image Gallery

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Their personal, unique stories are woven into a tight score of folk songs, nursery rhymes and slogans from newspapers and websites. What the choristers have in common is that they come from the east of Europe, a Europe that is ‘traumatised by war’, ‘cannot murder the war’, and is tired of it. ‘It’s a scandal that the east is so far away,’ comes a sarcastic claim at one point. Among the songs, one tells of a mother who has flown in to save her daughter. There are themes of trauma in these songs, but also of motherhood, rescue and memory. Can the tragedy of each of these women be reduced to a slogan, a phrase that flashes before our eyes on our phone screens next to memes about animals in an endless flood of irrelevant information? The creators of the performance want us to ask ourselves seriously.

The fifty-five minutes of the performance pass surprisingly quickly. The multitude of languages used (Ukrainian, Belarusian, English and Polish) does not hinder a thing; it does not make it any less communicative. On the contrary – each of these homesick women, whether from the distant Crimea, Brest or Warsaw, is one of us. Conducting the chorus from the audience, Górnicka wants viewers to pause, at least for a moment, so that the endless images of war cease to be impersonal and the macabre does not turn into something ordinary – so that they do not lose their human, and in particular female and child, face.

The daughter of one of the choristers, who occasionally breaks out of the show’s strict score, is the very spring the shchedrivka seeks to call forth, the harbinger of a better tomorrow. Nevertheless, the Brechtian song of the mothers continues to ring out. When will we all be able to repeat ‘NEVER AGAIN’ as they do with such conviction?

The production has won numerous awards, toured internationally and was also shown at the 2024 Divine Comedy Festival in Kraków. The performance is a fixture of the cultural programme accompanying Poland’s EU Presidency in 2025.

Mothers: A Song for Wartime,

Concept & direction: Marta Górnicka

Libretto: Marta Górnicka & ensemble (Ukrainian-Belarusian-Polish)

Music: Marta Górnicka

Choreography: Evelin Facchini

Scenography: Robert Rumas

Costumes: Joanna Załęska

Performers: Liza Kozlova, Palina Dabravoåskaja, Svitlana Onischak, Kateryna Taran, Svitlana Berestovska, Valeriia Obodianska, Sasha Cherkas, Mariia Tabachuk, Yuliia Ridna, Natalia Mazur, Aleksandra Sroka, Katarzyna Jaźnicka, Bohdana Zazhytska, Anastasiia Kulinich, Hanna Mykhailova, Katerina Aleinikova, Elena Zui-Voitekhovskaya, Kamila Michalska, Maria Robaszkiewicz, Polina Shkliar, Ewa Konstanciak & Volha Kalakoltsava

Premiere: 29th September 2023, Powszechny Theatre, Warsaw

Originally written in Polish, translated by Patryk Grabowski, April 2025

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