MOTHERS A SONG FOR WARTIME

Press

Interview

Annette Embrechts interviewed Marta Górnicka about MOTHERS A SONG FOR WARTIME for the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant: ‘Seemingly, we are singing folk songs and rhymes; but in the meantime, we are firing words like weapens’.

Theatretip

MOTHERS A SONG FOR WARTIME is the ‘Theatretip of the week’ in the radio programme De Ochtend by Dutch broadcaster KRO-NCRV. The performance was recommended by Annette Embrechts, theatre reviewer for de Volkskrant. You can listen to the entire fragment (in Dutch) here.

Reviews

***** 5 stars for MOTHERS

“The intensely beautiful, chilling Mothers, a song for wartime could be called an act of liberation.” MOTHERS A SONG FOR WARTIME received five stars from NRC.

Shira Keller, NRC

“Choir of 21 women makes impressive statement about wartime motherhood and powerlessness”

Nuno Blijboom, Theaterkrant

This hour is an eternity and overwhelming dread.
You have seen and experienced things for which there are no words.
About which they speak and sing here, together, in a clear and strict form.
With an attitude that moves and shocks.

Rüdiger Schaper, TAGESSPIEGEL

Human greatness against the brutality of war.
This evening is a choral tale from the strength of the individual, which tells of dark violence and ends in bright humanity.

Doris Meierhenrich, BERLINER ZEITUNG , Marta Górnicka’s miracle weapon against the war in the Berlin Maxim Gorki Theatre.

MOTHERS A SONG FOR WARTIME of Marta Górnicka, this is the proposition of big theatrical and political strength.

Manuel Piolat Soleymat, LA TERASSE

In MOTHERS artist Marta Górnicka proposes a powerful political reactivation of antique chorus.

Caroline Chatelet, SCENEWEB.FR

***** 5 stars for MOTHERS

The latest incarnation of Marta Górnicka’s choral project is a strong, moving, perfectly constructed and performed statement by woman experienced by war and dictatorship.

Aneta Kyzioł, POLITYKA

Shchedrivka performed by a choir of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters is simply moving. And for several reasons. Firstly, because it is about regaining the voice and the place where this voice can be heard. Secondly, because it contains wishes for all of us. Thirdly, because of the tribute to the tradition of Ukrainian singing, a living voice that pierces and deeply touches. This singing is a space which cannot be appropriated. And this voice is a voice that, despite everything, cannot be silenced.

Wiktoria Tabak, DIDASKALIA

In the form of songs, lullabies, nursery rhymes, poems, magical formulas, declarations of resistance, and testimonies that weave the score, rhythm, and movement of this female multitude. Body, voice, and collective intelligence as a prodigious result of stories, tears, wounds, nostalgias, rebellions. It is a protest, an accusation, a plea, a warning, and also a hope, the one that is declared immediately, at the beginning of the show, with a traditional Ukrainian song (shchedrivka).

Sara Chiappori, La Repubblica

The youngest, Polina, is nine years old. The oldest, Maria, is seventy-two. Along with them, there are nineteen other women, from different generations and with different biographies, united by the same fate: they have all suffered and faced the consequences of war and the oppression of power. They are Ukrainians fleeing from Mariupol, Irpen, Kharkiv, Belarusians persecuted by the Lukashenko regime, and Poles who have opened their homes to welcome them. Together they form the protagonist choir of Mothers.

Sara Chiappori, La Repubblica