Sonya Lifschitz – Creative Women

A musical ode to women who have shaped our world.

Following on from the success of their acclaimed work Stalin’s Piano, Sonya Lifschitz and Robert Davidson deliver Creative Women — an audio-visual epic for solo piano and video that tells stories of female artists, scientists and politicians through the words of the subjects made musical.

A musical portrait gallery of creators spanning a millennium, Creative Women weaves together archival audio, narrative and music in a tapestry of stories celebrating discovery. The voices of Frida Kahlo, Marie Curie, Nina Simone, Patti Smith, Clara Schumann’s students, Aunty Delmae Barton, Malouma, Greta Thunberg, Rachel Carsons and other adventurers are joined by Sonya’s own narrative voice — including a conversation with her grandmother and great aunt about their escape from Kyiv as Nazi bombs fell. These are stories of people bringing their fullest selves to the challenges of convention, danger, inertia and prejudice.

Creative Women is an exploration of the ever-simmering tension between courage and doubt, triumph and failure, tenderness and fierceness.