Chorus of Women is presenting a five-day Festival for Peace featuring music, public forums, conversations, a one-day workshop hosted by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom on the theme ‘Women’s Power to Stop War, storytelling for children, schools events, displays and more.
The festival is inspired by over 1200 women from 12 warring and neutral nations who established a framework for permanent peace and great advances in international law and institutions when they met in The Hague for the International Congress of Women, which was the only international peace conference of the First World War.
The centrepiece of the festival will be premiere performances of A Passion for Peace by the Canberra composer-librettist and Jungian analyst Dr Glenda Cloughley. The Passion is a choral drama that enlivens the classical tradition of oratorio to create a vibrant form of community participation in the great issues of our time.
The oratorio surrounds the history of this remarkable congress with present day stories of the grief and trauma of war, which is still reverberating down the generations from Gallipoli to the present day, and our responsibility to future generations. The voices of soloists sound from among a Citizens’ Chorus to reflect that the first homes of civic and international harmony are families and communities.
The 1200 women who gathered in The Hague knew this and wrote it into their resolutions that gave a method of continuous mediation to end the First World War together with the principles of permanent peace. These resolutions heralded the great advances in human rights and international law since 1915, including the criminalisation of women’s violation in war, and the establishment of the League of Nations (later the UN) and the International Court of Justice.
For more information, visit: http://www.chorusofwomen.org/events.htm.
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