Influential Jewish women of the 20th century, from flamboyant Ballets Russes star Ida Rubinstein to founding feminist Gloria Steinem, are among famous females to be celebrated next month at a three-week festival marking International Women’s Day (IWD).
Women’s Voices: A Celebration, created by prominent Jewish producer Naomi Sorkin, honours women of many creeds and nationalities but features an extraordinary amount of Jewish subject matter. Events will include a video poem lamenting the loss of life in the death camps, another set to the words of a teenage poetess murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania, and an Oscar-winning documentary about the American bandleader Artie Shaw.
The theme of IWD this year is Inspire Inclusion. For Jewish women in 2025, this resonates more strongly than ever.
The festival takes place at The Playground Theatre (near Grenfell Tower), which has been described as West London’s answer to the Almeida, showcasing innovative work involving top-tier performers including Steven Berkoff, Maureen Lipman and Ruby Wax.
“The theatre was founded by my husband, Peter Tate, in 1998 as a research and development studio and became a theatre in 2017,” says Naomi, who rose to fame as a dramatic ballerina in the USA before relocating to London. “We have had many Oscar and Olivier winners coming through, and this festival will be no exception.”
Aimee Birnbaum
The star performers include Emmy and Tony winner Stockard Channing, who plays Steinem in the closing event, Gloria: A Life, created by Jewish writer-director Emily Mann, while Celia Imrie, holder of a Best Performance Olivier, co-stars with Naomi Sorkin in Madame Ida, a film about the final days of Ida Rubinstein, who danced opposite Nijinsky and for whom Ravel wrote his haunting Bolero. The film, by Jewish writer-director Lisa Forrell, also co-stars former Bond girl Maryam d’Abo.
The festival also features the European premiere of a documentary about Jewish bandleader Artie Shaw which won its director, Brigitte Berman, an Academy Award.
Opening the festival on 2 March will be The Divine Feminine, an exhibition by Jewish artist Aimee Birnbaum, a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours who has had one-woman shows in New York, Vilnius, Thessaloniki and Croatia as well as in London. The internationally-collected painter has created a series of depictions of iconic women including the Shekinah, also known as the Shabbos Bride, and Adam’s first wife, Lilith.
“The Divine Feminine is a female counterpart to the masculine worship structures that have dominated organised religion,” says Aimee, who has embodied in paint both the positive feminine presence of God in her Shekinah, welcomed into Jewish homes on Friday nights, and in Lilth, Adam’s first wife, an aspect originally considered evil.
“She began as a female demon threatening the sexual and reproductive aspects of life, especially childbirth, but has since been reclaimed by Jewish feminists as a symbol of autonomy, independence and sexual liberation.”
Lilith by Aimee Birnbaum
Alongside these biblical icons and fictional heroines like Shakespeare’s Tatiana, Aimee, who when not painting spends hours researching the Jewish music of interwar eastern Europe, has included a wistful violinist playing in one of Kovno’s legendary 1930’s nightclubs “I was thinking about the brief flowering of musical life in those lost Lithuanian clubs before the Holocaust,” she says.
It is ballet which introduced Naomi to Aimee, who studied with a teacher from the Royal Ballet in her native Boston before settling in London 40 years ago. “It’s my love of dance and movement which informs my painting,” she says of her ethereal watercolours. The pair met at The Playground after Naomi’s stage performance as Rubinstein. Dance will feature strongly in the festival, not only in Madame Ida, but in documentaries about legendary ballerina Lynn Seymour, Naomi’s close friend who died this year, and the ground breaking dancer Loie Fuller: “Her special effects incorporating light, movement and fabric still influence everyone from pop stars to radical theatre makers today.” says Naomi.
The real Ida Rubenstein
Of particular Jewish interest are two short films by Hungarian writer and artist Csilla Toldy, including Here I Stand, commissioned in Ireland to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. The other, To My Dear Idealist, based on a poem by another Nazi victim, Lithuania’s Matilda Olkinaite, murdered in 1941, won Toldy the prize for best cinematography at the European Film Union Gala.
Alla Sirenko meeting the Camilla
Yet another award-winner appearing at the festival is composer and pianist Alla Sirenko, the only Ukrainian composer to have had her work performed at the Royal Opera House. She will perform arias, Ukrainian songs and her own original music with renowned soprano Lyubov Kachala.
Other highlights include a screening of Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, starring Sam Neill and Diahann Carroll, after which Tina Andrews, who won a Writers Guild award for her interpretation of the enslaved woman’s long relationship with US president Thomas Jefferson, will host a Q&A session.
Race relations also loom large in Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got, telling how the swing era maestro hired black performers including Billie Holliday and trumpeters Hot Lips Page and Roy Eldridge. Jewish jazz singer Mel Torme is among the roster of interviewees featured in the film, which has never been shown here despite winning a 1986 Oscar.
Gloria Steinem
Naomi intends the ambitious festival to be a recurring feature of the London theatrical calendar. “It’s an event I hope we will reprise every year to mark International Women’s Day. At a time when headlines reflect growing violence and abuse against women, it’s crucial to champion the female talent and creativity shaping the arts today. From classic narratives to cutting-edge work, Women’s Voices is designed to reflect the full range of female experience.”
Women’s Voices: A Celebration is at The Playground Theatre 2 – 23 March. theplaygroundtheatre.org.uk
