The songs used in the concert were collected by Teatr ZAR during their expeditions to Georgia, Bulgaria, Greece, Sicily and Corsica. The group will perform polyphonic songs of Corsican confraternities with Bulgarian, Rumanian, Icelandic and Chechen musical motifs woven into them. They will also sing liturgical songs from the Orthodox Republic of Monks, Athos. The music of the Svaneti people, who inhabit the highest region of the Caucasus, will be given special prominence. Their funeral songs, called zar, have their roots in the beginning of the common era and are the oldest form of polyphony in Georgia, if not in the world. Zar songs, from which the company takes its name, will form the essence of this concert.

The songs performed will be an extended version of the musical scores of Overture, Caesarean Section: Essays on Suicide and Anhelli: The Calling, which make up Gospels of Childhood, a triptych of performance pieces created over the span of six years from 2003 to 2009, which culminated ten years of Teatr ZAR’s research which started in 1999. Gospels of Childhood premiered in 2009 in London’s Barbican Centre before touring in the US, Spain, India, Rumania and Italy. The triptych won the Wrocław Theatre Prize in 2010.