Rowan Rheingans: Women Make Music
Rowan Rheingans is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, writer and composer best known for her work with folk bands Lady Maisery, The Rheingans Sisters and super-group Songs of Separation. With these projects, Rowan has won two BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards (‘Best Original Track’ and ‘Best Album’) and is a five-times nominee. Folk Radio UK recently described her as “not just an excellent songwriter but someone with a fine grasp of the delicate balance of joy and pain that makes us human”.
Rowan’s long-anticipated debut solo project is inspired by her German grandmother’s recollections of childhood during the Second World War. Exploring themes of identity, history, memory and trauma recovery through storytelling and song, The Red Dress is a newly composed musical essay, rooted in folk traditions and drawing on avant-garde sound worlds and spoken word. As well as deeply personal work, The Red Dress is an anti-war piece, inviting listeners to encounter the complexities underneath the ever dominant ‘us and them’ narrative.
Dancing in the places where hope and despair live together, The Red Dress reiterates the possibilities we all have for our own small acts of remembering, the power of re-telling and the danger of forgetting.