The International Theatre Institute - German Centre (ITI) is awarding the ITI Germany Prize 2025 to director Marta Górnicka. The prize is endowed with €3,000 and will be presented following a guest performance by Marta Górnicka & The Chorus of Women of ‘Mothers - A Song For Wartime’ on 11 June 2025 at the Heidelberg Theatre. The international co-production is Górnicka's most recent work: in it, a choir of Belarusian, Polish and Ukrainian women thematise the ongoing ritual of violence against women and children in the context of war and persecution.
On the occasion of World Theatre Day on 27 March 2025 and the honouring with the ITI Prize, Marta Górnicka has her own message:
The choice for Górnicka as recipient of the 2025 prize was made on the basis of a shortlist proposed for voting to the members of the ITI by the jury, consisting of ITI members Nora Amin, Milena Gehrt, Maria Rößler, Lucien Strauch and Ulrike Syha.
The jury's decision states:
‘With her vision of bringing powerful choruses of women to the stage in conjunction with often brutal socio-political realities, Marta Górnicka succeeds in placing people at the centre of her productions whose voices are otherwise barely heard publicly.’
Yvonne Büdenhölzer, President of the ITI Germany:
‘We are delighted to honour Marta Górnicka with the ITI Germany Prize. In her works, the choir is both a theatrical and a political form. Her choruses are convincing in their precession, nuance and power and open up spaces for reflection and dialogue - often for marginalised perspectives.’
Marta Górnicka is regarded as the rediscoverer of choral theatre in Europe. Since 2009, she has been working on the constant redefinition of the tragic chorus as a collective mouthpiece for social dialogue. To this end, Górnicka has developed her own method of vocal training. In 2019, she founded the Political Voice Institute in Berlin, a social laboratory of modern choral theatre with an international ensemble.
In her theatre works, the spoken choir itself acts as the sole protagonist, whereby the choral form also serves as a tool for the critical processing of modern mechanisms of power, control, exclusion and violence. Górnicka's choirs - often women's choirs - appear as changeable communities that - whispering to shouting - sometimes create militant determination, sometimes doubtful nuances and quiet, gentle moments. With ‘Constitution For The Chorus Of Poles’ (2016), Górnicka brought together over 50 people of different political persuasions in Warsaw for a choral performance in public space. Soon afterwards, she was no longer able to produce her political theatre works in Poland, which was ruled by the extreme right at the time. Berlin became the new centre of her artistic work. Here she created the choral intervention ‘Grundgesetz. Ein Chorischer Stresstest’ (2018/2019), which questioned the German constitution and democracy and was performed in front of the Brandenburg Gate and the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe.
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