Hymn to love

It is a play about Europe that is closing. Another nations cry: Give us our country back! And Poles zealously stand in this choir.

"Hymn to love" for orchestra, chorus of teddy bears and others is a spectacle about Europe which is closing. Another nations raise a cry: Give us our country back! And Poles zealously stand in this choir.

The play tells that each nation likes to forget. And people-bombs are already so angry that they explode. And this way everything repeats itself. So, especially for us, the choir will sing the Song about the Forgetful Nation:

The TRUTH is that this NATION has let it happen. That some of these chosen children would die, even though they were not the children of this nation. OK. That's fine. And it was NOT THIS country but THAT ONE: (high and low) GERMANY. And we know nothing about it. WE HAVE NOT SEEN IT. Some facts have been adapted for the needs of the story. And because we HAVE OWNED this country and this nation for a short time, so we fight, we fight for it to be OUR COUNTRY, our POLAND, only OURS, OUR OWN.

So now we cannot afford to accept those Escaping. Oh, no, we cannot afford it. We have a lot of space, but not enough of it. We will not put in any more. Let us love them in their own land and let those to blame should help them first. And in addition everyone would get our promotions for smartphones and all sales discounts.

And we Poles like that...

MY HOME IS YOUR HOME

... we like low prices!

„Hymn to Love” closes the director's European triptych around MOTHER COURAGE. The image of the orchestra playing in the Nazi concentration camps and the subject of the Holocaust become a starting point for Górnicka to address the threads of nationalist tendencies growing in Europe and the migration crisis. In the „Hymn…”libretto the director demonstrates the violence of the language of today's politics. She reaches for the hateful language spreading on the Internet, quotes fundamentalist and terrorists statements (including the parts of 2083 European Declaration of Independence – the Anders Breivik’s manifesto, speeches of the ISIS leaders Abu-Bakra and Ben Laden) and politicians’ speeches and then confronts them with pop songs and pieces from patriotic songs. Górnicka uses musical and ritual structures, evokes national songs and fragments of the liturgy in order to ask where the will they leads us.

„In HYMN TO LOVE I compose the monstrous „National Songbook”. I recall different versions of the national anthem, marches, patriotic, religious and folk songs – our community repertoire which has been so eagerly mixed today by the nation's rappers: IT'S THE DAY OF BLOOD AND GLORY!

During my work I had also in mind the image of the Nazi concentration camp orchestra playing German classics, marches and hits from pre-war operettas. The prisoners were forced to sing together. Music took part in the Holocaust. I follow this alliance of song and murder.

I believe that the CHOIR, as a collective figure, can show how unconscious collective mechanisms work. Its song reveals the horror of a community that is bound by love for a homeland inhabited only by Our people. The homeland-family which safety and purity must be ensured which means to get rid of all foreign bodies – other races, other religions, other orientations. Such love is the perverse realization of the commandment „Love thy neighbour as thyself”! This is the call for the action for the Cleaners/Saviours who fight for us to be able to love our  alike brothers in an unobstructed way. Anders Breivik demands „you must worship me for my seventy-seven victims” and then „actions like mine save hundreds of thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost during the upcoming civil wars. I am cleaning up the world. I come to heal.”

Breivik repeats with a smile that he is absolutely healthy, as evidenced by the whole history of our civilization. He is right. How should we respond to this terrible logic?

Marta Górnicka