The Polish director and singer Marta Górnicka presents a choral piece with 21 women from 10 to 71 years old, which are refugee from Mariupol, Kiev, Irpin and Kharkiv. A healing ritual based on a shchedrivka, a traditional Ukrainian and pre-Christian song performed only by women and children.
The show begins with a desire for happiness and rebirth of the world in the form of shchedrivka. In the pre-Christian era they believed in the power of song and were confident that their words and good wishes for someone in particular would come true. Today, these sung wishes are addressed to all and for life. Those who sing them are survivors. They are fleeing from war and persecution, witnesses of violence and bombings. Women from Ukraine and Belarus who now live in Poland and want to stand and speak together on stage. They use the power of their voices to name that for which there can be no words. They do not want to be heard as victims, but as the protagonists of their own stories.
"Our performance is about women and war. About defense mechanisms and responsibility. About our reaction to a war in Europe. About the rituals of wartime violence against women and civilians which are unchanging.”
In this project, hope and love transcend human cruelty. Onstage: 25 Ukrainian, Polish and Belarusian mothers and their children. The voices convey Ukrainian children’s voices full of life, traditional songs, magic spells and striking political statements. They are the refugees from Mariupol, Kiev, Irpin and Kharkiv. Some of them fled the war; others, persecution. They all have a place in the Heart of Mothers, which follows an operatic form that dates back to ritual women’s choruses from the seventh century BC. A chorus is an embodiment of collective, transgenerational wisdom, and it offers us the opportunity to imagine the unimaginable, like a world without war. Similar to the pre-Christian choruses whose main purpose was to care for citizens, individual experiences coexist alongside the collective imagination in these encounters, workshops and laboratories. The goal is to heal through community with a polyphony of voices and critical discourses.
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