MOTHER COURAGE WON’T REMAIN SILENT A CHORUS FOR WARTIME

A performance for a chorus of 60 Arab and Jewish mothers, Israeli dancer-soldiers, and Arab children, scored for four spaces in the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART in Tel Aviv. “Mother Courage can’t remain silent” is a chorus of two tongues (Arabic and Hebrew) and one voice.

In this project, Marta Górnicka, the author of a new form of chorus theatre, brings her research to the space of particularly understood social theatre direction. She invites groups functioning in radically conflicted communities to participate in the performance, and she works with them creating a possibility to express extreme affections and enable direct interaction between those who are usually separated by an invisible barrier. It’s no longer about reproduction of conflict or mechanisms of its expansion on a stage but about revealing it in its full intensity and deadly collisions. And, despite all that, to find an opportunity to create a joint work that will speak in many languages and in one human voice at the same time.

The chorus, which is formed in the course of such work, gives a chance to transform fatal antagonisms into agonism revealed on stage. It allows people divided by irreducible differences to stand next to each other, people who, by the very fact of cooperation in the domain of voice and body recognize the legitimacy of those whom policies define as “enemies”.

The point also is to ask a radical question about social effectiveness of art versus the most difficult challenges of the modern world. And by asking, at the same time to make an effort to transform art into a tool for crossing constantly increasing hostility attitudes in societies. 

Who is Mother Courage today? Who are the women in a system of war and conflict? In the location where one of the world’s biggest conflicts takes place, the Chorus will speak: we will hear the words like bullets, combined with singing and songs for children.

The Chorus will speak against the images of “conflict”, “other”, and “enemy”, born in an usurped language. In this surreal world of war, where violence is cropped, one doesn’t know any more what is “violence” and what is “defence,” what are “lives at risk” and what are “valuable lives”, what is an “act of terror” and what is a defence against this act, who is a “friend” and who is the “enemy”?

Will war as a “business” will be reproduced indefinitely? Am I not “human enough”? – one of the mothers asked. Who is “more human”: an Arab or a Jew? “As long as we see a human  being in the other person, in this and only in this way will we stop the madness?” Robi Damelin, an Arab mother, asks. 

There, where it seems that there are no more voices – we’ll try to speak.

There, where one can only be afraid of words – we’ll sing.

“MOTHER is an extreme project. The Arab and Jewish women whom I met are wise, brave. During the rehearsals, they cry out as if they were singing. They sing as if they were crying out (…) Together, we will ask what a human being is.”