ILT - CHORUS THEATRE WITH MARTA GÓRNICKA
CHORUS THEATRE
A Masterclass by international star, conductor and director MARTA GÓRNICKA
In this masterclass, internationally acclaimed director Marta Górnicka opens her rehearsal room and shares her unique working method at the intersection of voice, body, language, and politics.
Presented in a close collaboration with ILT Festival and ILT Academy. We are grateful for this generous collaboration. Thank you Malene Cathrine Pedersen and her brilliant team. Check out the full artistic program at International performing arts festival in Aarhus.
With her choral theater, Marta Górnicka has found a very unique, powerful theatrical language and at the same time a form on how to express and deal with violence and unbearable realities on stage.
Her art form makes it possible to negotiate things for which we lack language and psychological tools.
In her new production "MOTHERS. A song for Wartime", a must-see at this year's ILT Festival, she creates a chorus form in which Ukrainian women can also talk about sexual violence in the current full scale war of Russia on Ukraine, giving them a voice.
In this masterclass Marta Górnicka shares her working practice with the audience and shows how complicated dream work and the overcoming of unreconciled political conflicts can be made conceivable by means of art.
How can we work on a fringe of language and voice? What way to build a meeting place of different languages, discourses and voices today? We will look for a place where we are able to find the transformative power of the CHORUS.
The masterclass takes place on May 21, 2025, from 15:00 to 17:30 at Teater Katapult in Aarhus. .
CHORUS theatre is for me the place where I can meet people, who have no chance to meet each other in other circumstances in reality. And whom politics defines as enemies very often. I see theatre as a new form of solidarity. Place where a better world is imaginable and possible.
- Marta Górnicka for Theatre der Zeit
Photo by Esra Rotthoff.
Marta Górnicka (PL) is a director, writer, and singer, a graduate of the Warsaw National Academy of Dramatic Art and the Chopin University of Music. She founded the Political Voice Institute (PVI) in 2019 in Berlin, where she has developed her practice of the chorus in its formal and political dimensions. In her choruses, voices and bodies, individually or together, are intrinsically political instruments. She explores a variety of choral forms to create confrontations with unbearable realities.
Marta Górnicka uses the stage as a platform to enact discourses of conflict and resolution, giving members of different communities the opportunity to make their voices heard and to recognise their shared humanity.
Górnicka creates a unique idiom of chorus theatre, where voices and bodies of performers, individually and combined, are intrinsically political instruments. She exploits a variety of choral formats to instigate confrontations with unbearable realities. Górnicka uses the stage as a platform to enact discourses of conflict and resolution, creating opportunities for members of communities to air their voices but also recognize each other’s common humanity.
Górnicka’s performances This is the chorus speaking, Magnificat, Requiemachine, M(other) Courage, Hymn to love, were invited and presented in more then ninghty the most known theatres and festivals worldwilde such as: Berliner Festspiele, Athens & Epidaurus Festival in Athens, New SPIELART Festival in Munich, Festival d’Avignon, just to mentioned a few.
She has led drama workshops at prestigious stages such as Piccolo Teatro di Milano, Italy, X- Theater Tokio- Japan, Kammerspiele Munich, Thalia Theater Hamburg, Germany, National Theatre – Teheran, Iran, New Dheli – India or Museum of Modern Art in Tel Aviv.
Górnick graduated of the Drama Directing Department at the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw and Frederic Chopin School of Music in Warsaw.
In the years 2009-2014 at the Zbigniew Raszewski Theater Institute in Warsaw she created her own concept of the chorus theatre CHORUS OF WOMEN - a modern tragic chorus. The inception of the group was rooted in the idea of "reclaiming the female voice" and creating a post-modern chorus theater - an aesthetic, formal and ideological concept of theater that combines the power of the collective voice/body, which is the source of the Western stage, with the contemporary criticism of language as a tool of power.
She created outstanding social and artistic projects, including: in Israel (Mother Courage Won't Remain Silent. A Chorus for Wartime, 2014), where she worked with a team of Arab and Jewish mothers and children and Israeli soldier-dancers. The show involved groups operating in radically conflicted communities, which opened the possibility of expressing extreme emotions and direct interaction between those who are separated by an invisible barrier on a daily basis. In Germany (Grundgesetz Ein Chorischer Stresstest, Berlin 2018; Grundgesetz – Federal Constitutional Court Karlsruhe, Jedem das Seine - Kammerspiele Munich, Still Life -Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin 2021) or in Poland (Here the Choir speaks... 2010, Magnificat 2011, Hymn to Love 2017, Constitution for the Chorus of Poles 2019). Detailed information are available at ://gornicka.com/
For CONSTITUTION FOR THE CHORUS OF POLES she gathered over 50 people from the right and left wing of the political conflict, from sport fans, Jews, refugees, children, pensioners, members of the „Gun practicing“ association,to people with Down syndrome and actors of THE CHORUS OF WOMEN. „The show premiered on the 1st of May 2016 i.e. the International Worker’s Day, during great national debate caused by the turmoil surrounding the Constitutional Tribunal. Marta Górnicka reacted to this crisis with a powerful gesture: she showed that Polish constitution is not a project of an ethnically homogeneous group, but a very diverse group of individuals.”. (fragment of the program booklet for Late Polishness [Późna Polskość] exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw)
HYMN TO LOVE for Orchestra, a Chorus of Plushies and Others closing the director’s European triptych. The image of an orchestra playing in extermination camps and the subject of the Holocaust becomes, for Górnicka, a starting point to address the threads of nationalist tendencies growing in Europe and the migration crisis.
The Polish premiere of the production was held on 21 January at the Polski Theatre in Poznań, the German premiere on 11 June at the MAXIM GORKI THEATER in Berlin, and the French one on 12 November 2018 at the Théâtre des Celestines in Lyon.
In Górnicka's performances and social projects, the chorus functions as a metonymy of the community, exposing its inherent tensions, revealing the mechanisms of exclusion and consolidation of the community, and talking about its relations of power and domination. At the same time, the chorus in her performances is always a real community experience, opening access to rituals and communal practices that are a source for the community at the breath, body and voice level.Therefore, they have both a critical potential and the power of a renewed ritual - they are a living laboratory for examining and establishing a community.
She is a multiple winner of the ranking of the German portal Nachtcritik.de for the best play of the year in Germany and German-speaking countries, winner of the Award for Best Director – Fast Forward European Directing Festival. In 2016, her M(OTHER) COURAGE was nominated for the prestigious German award "DER FAUST" in the theater directing category. In 2019 Marta Górnicka won the “POLITYKA’s Passport” award “for the contemporary concept of the ancient chorus as a vehicle of artistic and social change”. In 2022 she has been awarded The Bertolt Brecht Visiting Professorship at Centre of Competence for Theatre at University Leipzig. Bertolt Brecht Professorship is awarded to the outstanding artists from the fields of theatre, dance, performance and media art.
Since 2019, Marta Górnicka has developed the Political Voice Institute at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. The Institute is a workshop center for working with the collective voice/body and language, it is a social laboratory that works to build open, diverse communities and strengthen strategies of resistance and criticism towards violence in social life.
The director has developed her own method of vocal and acting breath/voice/body training, aimed at finding an organic voice. Based on this method, she conducted theater workshops and master classes in many places around the world, including: in Dresden,Tokyo, Berlin, Kiev, London, Tel Aviv, Nottingham, Lyon, Milan, Athens, Brussels, Tehran, New Delhi and Paris.
In 2023, the Festival d'Avignon invited her to present a reading of MOTHERS A SONG FOR WARTIME in the courtyard of the Musée Calvet in Avignon. The world premiere of the play MOTHERS took place on September 29, 2023 at the Powszechny Theater in Warsaw, the French premiere on October 4 at Le Maillon, Théâtre de la Ville de Strasbourg in Strasbourg, and the German premiere on November 4 at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin.
In 2024 and 2025 MOTHERS were presented during many European theater festivals, including Barcelona, Milan (Milano Porta Europa), Utrecht (SPRING Utrecht), Salzburg (Sommerszene Salzburg), Düsseldorf (Europäisches Theaterfestival 777 TAGE ДНІВ DAYS), Freiburg (Performing Democracy), Hannover (KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen), Bern in Switzerland (Auawirleben Theatrefestival Bern), Leipzig , Kraków, Geneva - Comedie de Geneve, Zurich, Paris, Lyon and during the Avignon Festival in the Courtyard of Honor of the Palace of the Popes.
In 2024/25 Marta Górnicka holds the position of Christoph Schlingensief guest professorship at the Ruhr University in Bochum. This prestigious professorship, established by the Kunststiftung NRW in 2015 for the master’s program in scenic research, is awarded to outstanding artists from around the world working in the field of theater and performance.
Marta Górnicka is internationally celebrated for her theater productions, in which the use of choral forms plays an important role. Her works are as powerful as they are provocative and combine aesthetic radicalism with profound social criticism.
