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7Mar. 2017.

Welcome to International Women's Day



Today we are marking International Women’s Day with stories of some of the extraordinary women who feature in a series of events during our coming season.  We are very proud to be presenting diverse shows both by and about very special women and we invite you to join us in celebrating these exceptional lives and works.



In May, we welcome National Opera Studio with works from three celebrated female composers, Dubai – Rostov – New York. The Rostov of the title was the Russian birthplace of pioneering psychoanalyst, Sabina Spielrein, her home for much of her life and scene of her tragic death in 1942. Sabina’s story is told by composer Errollyn Wallen, described by The Observer as a 'renaissance woman of contemporary British music'.


Born in 1885, Sabina, along with her siblings, suffered a brutal upbringing at the hands of a violent mother and tyrannical father. She was also highly educated with an extremely sharp mind. A diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ in her late teens (now easily recognisable as a natural response to the trauma she suffered throughout childhood) led to her becoming the patient of a young psychiatrist by the name of Carl Jung, who was keen to try a new approach known as psychoanalysis. Sabina was not only cured but inspired to begin assisting Jung with his research, then to study and become an analyst herself. She played a primary role in the development of child psychology and her work and thought is known to have had a significant impact on those of both Jung and Freud. She published 30 papers in French and German, most notably on schizophrenia and, still only in her mid-twenties, was elected to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1911. Despite this, the name Sabina Spielrein has been surprisingly little-known until recently and her own outstanding achievements have frequently been overshadowed by a preoccupation with her love affair with Jung and Freud’s disapproval of their relationship. Even her groundbreaking work in child psychology has been wrongly attributed to others such as Anna Freud or Melanie Klein.

Not only did Sabina Spielrein excel in her field, she overcame massive obstacles as a woman working in a male profession and a Jewish woman during a period of extreme anti-Semitism. The latter culminated in her murder at the hands of a German SS squad, brutally cutting short a brilliant life and career. Errollyn Wallen says of her ‘I am in awe of Spielrein for the sheer power of her mind and for her extraordinary ability to think herself out of her own mental illness — and beyond the prejudice which faced her and women of her time.  I have lived with Sabina Spielrein’s story for several years now and am extremely lucky that David Pountney has written a powerful libretto which contains much of Spielrein’s own writing. Composing an opera based on a person who has actually lived presents emotional and artistic challenges . . .  However, telling the stories of our time — and the stories of the women of our time is one of my principal objectives as an artist.   I hope that anyone coming to the opera Sabina Spielrein will be as enlightened and moved by her story as David Pountney and I have been.’


Errollyn Wallen and Sabina Spielrein

Dubai – Rostov – New York: Scenes from Contemporary Opera runs 4 – 6 May and you can buy tickets here.


At the end of June, we present Jessica Walker’s portrayal of 1930s Paris cabaret sensation, Suzy Solidor in All I want is One Night.

Jessica describes Suzy as ‘conceivably the most famous woman you’ve never heard of’. Yet she was one of the most celebrated and wealthy entertainers of the 1930s, the toast of Paris, her image captured in 225 portraits by some of the 20th century greatest artists, including Tamara de Lempicka, Francis Bacon, Jean Cocteau and Man Ray. After coming across Suzy’s story in Robert Aldrich’s compendium, Gay Life Stories, Jessica was curious as to how this woman, once so successful, could sink into obscurity and she began to delve into her fascinating and ultimately sad story.

Born in Brittany at the turn of the last century, poor, uneducated and illegitimate, young Suzanne soon showed her mettle when, barely more than fourteen, she lied about her age in order to drive ambulances during the First World War. In her twenties, resourceful, determined and already skilled in using her wiles and beauty to get ahead, she took herself, penniless, to Paris where she soon found a lover and benefactor – rich antiquarian Yvonne de Bremond d’Ars – and established herself as a couture swimwear model. After discovering her singing voice and leaving Yvonne for a wealthy producer of luxury cars, she opened her own nightclub, in which she sang erotic lesbian songs surrounded by adoring audiences and her growing collection of portraits painted by artists who recognised the value of displaying their work in a club increasingly frequented by the great and the good. Suzy starred alongside Edith Piaf in Jean de Limur’s 1936 film La Garçonne and, two years before Dietrich, she recorded a French version of ‘Lily Marlène’. Her fame, however, could not protect her from being found guilty of collaboration with the German officers who enjoyed her club's hospitality and she was exiled from France, an experience from which she never quite recovered. On her return, she opened a new club on the Côte d’Azur but she was now middle-aged, the world no longer desired her or wanted to look at her as it once had. She stubbornly resisted making changes to an act that people no longer wanted to see. When audiences dwindled to nothing, she closed the club, opened an antique shop and took to dressing as an admiral until she died, aged 83, in comparative obscurity; wealthy, obese and, as Jessica strongly suspects, lonely.



Initially, Jessica was drawn to Suzy’s compelling alpha-female image. In a country where women would not even be granted the vote until 1945, here was a sexually potent woman, refusing to be labelled, unapologetic and proud of who she was. What’s more, hugely successful, including financially. Jessica describes her as ‘effortlessly gender fluid, shamelessly capitalist and seemingly without recourse to feelings of guilt when it came to her poly-amorous relationships. She had the most powerful sense of self and, unlike many lesbians presented in mainstream media today, she was far from cosy and un-threatening, she was dangerous.’ Yet, for all her emancipation and daring modernity, she allowed her life force to be inextricably linked to her desirability and this, combined with the vanity that prevented her from accepting her aging self, led to her downfall. Once her adoring public stopped gazing upon her with desire, she simply did not know what to do with herself. Jessica also believes this was what prompted her later reinvention as the admiral: ‘If she could not live with herself as a woman, she would become a man’.

It would be nice to believe that no woman, no performer, today could possibly face the same fate, the same pressure to hide herself away or resort to any other means to conceal the natural aging process. But how often do we read vicious media criticism of those who go to great lengths to defy the effects of age and, equally, of those who do not? Plus ça change . . .

All I Want is One night runs 27 June to 1 July and you can buy tickets here.


I
n July, we welcome back Poet in the City with Ladies of the Left Bank - a celebration of some of the greatest female modernist writers living and working in Paris between the wars.


‘I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.’  Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

At the turn of the 20th Century, the laissez-faire climate of Paris attracted the exiled American and European cultural community and Modernism as we know it was born.
 
Characterised by the way it ruptured conventional language structure, modernism made it possible to work with narratives that had previously been non-categorisable and non-linear. Suddenly, identities previously impossible to articulate could be recognised and developed. For Ladies of the Left Bank, Poet in the City have chosen to let the works of the women leading this movement to shine.

HD (Hilda Doolittle), Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and Nancy Cunard were all indisputable influencers of the avant-garde scene. As Poet in the City programmer, Georgia Attlesey explains, 'they created a new liberal language for women to express themselves and, by doing so, extended the ambitions of the modernist movement. These radical women capitalised on this opportunity to establish a defiant new voice that spoke freely on sexuality, politics and society. Without them, the landscape of modernism would have looked very different, and it is essential that we recognise their legacy and that their words continue to echo through history.'


Clockwise from top left: HD; Nancy Cunard; Sandeep Parmar; Lisa Dwan

This event also brings two very special contemporary women to the Wilton’s stage: celebrated actor Lisa Dwan, renowned for her unique approach to Beckett will read the poetry; and acclaimed scholar and poet Sandeep Parmar will provide an overview of the Modernist movement and the poets themselves.

Incidentally, Suzy Solidor was not the only female of great note whizzing round France in an ambulance during the First World War. Gertrude Stein bought her own Ford van and, together with her life-long partner, Alice B Toklas, she also worked as an ambulance driver for the French. During her time in France, Gertrude served as both hostess and an inspiration to such American expatriates as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and she is credited with coining the term ‘the Lost Generation’. Here's how fellow Modernist, Mina Loy, so succinctly and splendidly summed her up:

'Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word'

 So, we think Gertrude should have the last word here:

'There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.'

Ladies of the Left Bank is on 5 July and you can buy tickets here.



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