REQUIEMACHINE

Marta Górnicka’s third production is a continuation of her project for a modern tragic CHORUS that serves as a means of critical reflection upon man as shaped by the norms of culture, society, the economy and religion. This time, the voice of the CHORUS is directed against the universal domination of market forces. It is the body/voice of a society torn between the fear of unemployment and the excessive demands of the workplace. A choir takes the stage to perform an ecstatic requiem for a system in which freedom has been transformed into the technology of power. The libretto makes use of poems by Władysław Broniewski, fragments of speeches, letters, and children’s counting-out rhymes, which the CHORUS intersperses with philosophical discourse, advertising slogans, Socialist Realist songs, and heavy metal music.

“I am the burnt offering of every system”, Broniewski wrote, highlighting the dramatic tension between the crushing pressure of ideology and his belief in the power of the poetic word that was to revolutionize the world and save human subjectivity. Today, these texts, transposed onto the choral apparatus of collective body and voice, are truly striking. Revolutionary poems from the 1930s sound like a corporate anthem extolling performance in the workplace.

Maciej Nowak, Find a job up your ass

“The system fears a chorus. A chorus of the critical. A chorus of the outraged. A chorus generates collective energy, a kind of energy those in power don’t take kindly to.”

“REQUIEMASZYNA is an essay about the relationship of money and power. It was originally inspired by the robotic rhythms of Broniewski’s poetry and his harrowing biography, which I mashed up with Benetton’s Unemployee of the Year advertising campaign, the Imperial March from Star Wars, and the rasp of the poet’s cancer-stricken voice.

I wanted to expose the totalitarianism of contemporary strategies of supervision and discipline: mechanisms that transform residents of the neo-liberal paradise into an army of robotic workers.”