Through Mothers, A Song for Wartime, women who have survived war speak out. How did this project come about?
For several months, I conducted workshops in Warsaw with a group of twenty-one women: among them, Ukrainian women affected by the war, Belarusian women who suffered oppression and political persecution, Polish women who opened their doors and their hearts… They come from Kyiv, Sumy, Irpin, Kharkiv… They are aged between 9 and 72, forming an intergenerational group. They are survivors, refugees, witnesses of violence and bombings. They use the power of their voices to name the unnamable: violence against women. Violence and rape—both political and individual—are the greatest weapons of the Russian army. It is a tool of torture consciously used in this war, one of the most powerful weapons—more effective than murder—because it remains permanently with the surviving victim. This violence is immutable, endless. How can we react against a mechanism that repeats over and over, in cycles? The goal of the chorus is to unveil what is hidden, to show—sometimes in a monstrously concentrated way—what is absent from the official discourse. It is also a way of recovering memory, language, and voice: not the voice of women as silent victims but, on the contrary, as protagonists of the war.
There is, in this choral work, a form of ritual anchored in ancestral traditions…
In the tradition of the choruses of ancient theatre, mothers, in response to war and death, are destined to become either avengers who kill their enemies, or mourners. In this show, we try to find a third way. Together, we recreate the ancestral motif of the Anasyrma, the gesture of women lifting their skirts before a surging army as an act of protest and mockery; it becomes the starting point for a new choral song of war, a counter-lament, a song of freedom. Right from the start, I tried to find what—in Ukrainian tradition—could nourish this new song. I thought it was important to begin with a motif of opposition to the war, a source of power opposed to destruction. Mothers opens with a chtchedryvka, a Ukrainian song that is an ancient ritual, a wish for rebirth and prosperity. How can we collectively find what is alive beneath the rubble? Through unity, through the chorus as a metonymy for the plurality of voices and cultures.
Would you say that this chorus is an act of resistance for those women?
In responding to the cruelty of war, the chorus certainly resists. The actresses of Mothers often say that our show represents for them a sort of personal combat, that the chorus is a “weapon”: but a weapon forged through the wisdom of the community and love. The show rests on this life force. From its origins, practices of the chorus have been linked to women: the chorus brings us transgenerational memory, it has a cathartic power, it speaks through multiple voices, multiple mouths. It is older than any of us. In Mothers, A Song for Wartime, we try to reconnect to those original practices, to use multigenerational wisdom and these powerful Ukrainian voices: a force that can heal wounds, but also allows us to respond to the horror of reality, to the unspeakable. Whatever work I undertake with choral theatre, it is always about addressing the most difficult and challenging socio-political events of our reality, to offer a new voice and a new language, and an alternative vision of History with a capital H as well as individual stories.
Can you tell us more about the chtchedryvkas, those forms of traditional songs which inspired you?
The chtchedryvkas are sung by women and children to welcome the arrival of spring and celebrate the renewal of nature. Those ritual songs, dating back to pre-Christian times, were sung in villages: the singers would enter homes to offer their songs to everyone. To the poorest, the elderly, and the lonely, they wished joy, health, and a prosperous future. Those processions were very colourful, accompanied by the attributes of the chtchedryvka, stars, and emblematic instruments. It was believed the words of the songs would come true, that they would act like a spell and change the course of events.
The show has a collage quality to it, borrowing from very diverse sources…
I do not work with stories that would form a dramatic framework for the performance. As usual, the libretto I composed is a mixture of texts: political speeches alongside children’s poems, pop songs, lullabies, the writing of Lesya Ukrainka and of the greatest dramatic and choral poets, Sophocles and Euripides… Language is a playground where music can enter and resonate. The heart of the show, the moment which subverts the form, is the mothers’ monologue. They appear not as performers but as women who take part in the performance to share their human experiences, their life stories. The aesthetic approach is post-theatrical, raw, to make room for the voice. Through the music, the work on rhythm, and the transformation of sounds, we question the mechanism of language, expose it, and perhaps rediscover it in a new way. We ask what the words war and peace mean today.
For several years, you have been developing an original body of work which reinvents the form of the chorus. How did you come to be interested in this form?
As a plurality, the chorus is the ideal medium to evoke the political in the Greek sense of the word: the place where subjects concerning citizens and the State are discussed. I have worked on a contemporary form of the chorus to revive this ancient idea of theatre. I started my research in 2010 at the Theatre Institute in Warsaw, where I was able to experiment freely, which allowed me to find a new grammar for the chorus, a new type of text—by which I mean a libretto—and a new training regimen for the body and voice for the actors. In 2019, this research led to the creation of the Political Voice Institute (PVI) at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin.
What meaning can an act like Mothers, A Song for Wartime take as war rages on?
Mothers is a tribute to the tradition of Ukrainian singing, a living voice that enters and moves you. This song is a space that cannot be silenced. The large-scale invasion of Ukraine began two years ago now. How do we feel today in the fact of its monstrosities. How do we react to this “end of the world”? What is Europe’s stance? There is a form of fatigue and anger setting in. The length of the war creates a sort of distance. It is no longer front-page news. Its brutality leaves us speechless. On Facebook and Instagram, it is easy to scroll from atrocious images to lolcats. This is the reason why this show was born. We want to be the voice of this war. As the images of war fade, we want to be the voice that keeps them alive.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalant (March 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach