Hymn to love is a piece about Europe that closes the ranks and shouts: Give us our country back! Poland joins in this chorus with zeal.
It is the latest play in the director's European triptych inspired by Mother Courage. The image of an orchestra playing music in death camps and the Holocaust are a starting point for Górnicka to address the rise of present-day European nationalism and the migration crisis. In her libretto to HYMN TO LOVE, Marta Górnicka exposes the obscene language of politics today, quoting statements by fundamentalist fighters and terrorists (including fragments of Anders Breivik's manifesto 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence, and speeches by ISIL leader Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi and Osama bin Laden) alongside speeches made by legitimate politicians. Górnicka mashes up Internet hate-speech with pop lyrics and patriotic songs. She makes use of musical and ritual structures, and samples national anthems and fragments of church liturgy in an attempt to determine where the song that emerges out of all these sources might take us.
»In Hymn to love, I've composed a monstrous ›national songbook‹. I believe that the Chorus as a community-character can show how unconscious mechanisms of community function. Its song reveals the cruelty of a community bound together by love of the fatherland, in which only its own people exist. Such a love is a perverse realisation of the commandment ›Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself‹. ›You must honour me for my seventy-seven victims‹, says Anders Breivik, ›actions like mine save hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise meet their demise in a future civil war. I put the world in order. I come to heal‹. (Marta Górnicka)
MARTA GÓRNICKA IN AN INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE MITROPOULOS
Eine Produktion von THE CHORUS OF WOMEN Foundation und Teatr Polski w Poznaniu, in Koproduktion mit dem Maxim Gorki Theater und dem Ringlokschuppen Ruhr. Kofinanziert durch die Stadt Warschau, die Stadt Posen und die Kunststiftung NRW. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung des Goethe Instituts München, des Goethe Instituts Warschau und dem Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle