Author: florianduijsens

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Dead Ladies Show NYC #4

What better way to celebrate GALentine’s Day than by celebrating some fascinating, deceased dames!?

The fourth edition of the DEAD LADIES SHOW in NYC draws nigh: it will take place on Wednesday, 13 February, as usual from 7:00-9:00pm at the KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street).

Free admission; please buy a drink or two to ensure the future of DLS NYC at KGB.

Ida M Tarbell

IDA M. TARBELL, a pioneering investigative journalist, biographer, magazine editor, and lecturer, rose to fame in the early 20th century through her meticulous reporting and fearless pursuit of the truth. She took on John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company – at the time the largest oil refinery in the world – and exposed it as an illegal monopoly, leading to its dissolution. Throughout her lifetime, she authored twenty books, lectured in forty-eight states, and served on two Presidential committees. Perplexingly, this groundbreaking woman was also an outspoken anti-suffragette.

Martha Graham

MARTHA GRAHAM is arguably the single most important figure in American modern dance. Born in 1894, she pioneered a movement style, based on the principle of contraction and release, that is regarded as the first codified modern dance technique. She choreographed a total of 181 dances, collaborating with the likes of composer Aaron Copland and sculptor Isamu Noguchi, addressing social, political, and psychological themes, and consistently portraying powerful women, both mythical and historical. The first dancer to perform at the White House and travel as a cultural ambassador, her influence is evident in cultural icons as wide-ranging as Merce Cunningham and Madonna.

Doreen Valiente

Long before Instagram hyped witchcraft as aesthetic and feminist, DOREEN VALIENTE (1922-99) paved the way. Lauded as the Mother of Modern Witchcraft, she invigorated the Wiccan ‘revival’ in 1950s England and worked to make the defining texts of the religion more sacred and beautiful. Many key spells of Gardnerian Wicca benefit from her serious revisions. She joined and created several covens and became a witch historian in order to better understand and dispell misconceptions about Wicca. Doreen was a complicated and often contradictory woman whose struggles underpin much of the problems facing Wicca today.

Last but not least, a quick word about your presenters:

JENNIE YOUNG CARR is a merchandise planner (aka Excel geek) and amateur history buff.

NINA STOLLER-LINDSEY is an arts-focused writer and content strategist. She’s written about high art, popular culture, and everything in between for Quartz, The Atlantic, Forbes, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, Thrillist, Refinery29, and Mic. A former modern dancer-choreographer, she’s interested in bringing the arts to more diverse audiences and currently runs social media for TodayTix, a global ticketing platform connecting people to live performances around the world.
CLAIRE CARROLL is a writer and marketer from the Hudson Valley. As practicing herbalist and magical realist, she cares deeply about the texts and myths that underpin faith.

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Dead Ladies Show #20

This is our 20th show! Who would have thought that, back when the idea was fermented over a bottle of Rotkäppchen? We’re celebrating in the best way we know – by dressing up fancy and talking about dead ladies on stage. This edition brings you three tales of women who lived flirtatious, outrageous, and courageous lives, each in their own way: a writer of intense fiction and diaries, a celebrity chef, and an anti-Nazi spy. Brought to you by translator, writer, and literary organizer Lucy Jones, writer, campaigner, and foodie Mary Scherpe, and regular Katy Derbyshire. All held together, of course, by your beloved co-host Florian Duijsens. Raise a glass with us – as we toast ourselves and all of you, plus these three fascinating women. Come along and join us in the ACUD Studio on Tuesday, 26 February at 8 pm.

Presented in a messy mixture of English and German. €5 or €3 reduced entry. Doors open 7:30 pm – come on time to get a good seat and a good drink!

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East German writer Brigitte Reimann led an eventful life, cut short by cancer at the age of 39. She began writing at the age of 15, initially from within the GDR system, side by side with the workers and on official committees, showered with medals and awards. Reimann wrote short stories and plays for the stage, radio and screen – but publishers rejected her proposals for novels. Having married four times, she said of herself in one of her copious letters: “had a lot of men, did a lot of stupid things – that I don’t regret”. She devoted many years to her novel Franziska Linkerhand, published posthumously and in censored form in 1974, which even received grudging praise from West German critics. Today there are two libraries named after her, and her diaries are gradually being released in English translation.

British TV chef Fanny Cradock’s life was not exactly uneventful either. After her parents frittered away their money she was practically destitute in her youth, and only found her financial feet when she started working at restaurants and discovered fine dining. Eventually, she and her fourth husband got their own BBC television series, teaching the British how to cook fancy dishes without breaking the bank. She fell out of favour after two decades but continued to make the rounds of chat shows and celebrity quiz formats. Cradock is credited with introducing pizza to the UK and inventing the prawn cocktail (not an actual drink, don’t worry), and her eccentric manner mean she is well remembered to this day. Also, two of her marriages were bigamous, because why not.

War heroine Noor Inayat Khan lived to the age of 30. Her father, an Indian musician, playwright and religious teacher, met her American mother through the Sufi movement, and they raised their children in London and France. When World War II broke out, the family fled to England. A convinced pacifist, Inayat Khan hoped to fight the Nazis without shedding blood, and volunteered to train as a wireless operator. She was recruited to the Special Operations Executive and given truncated training before being flown into occupied France as an undercover operative. Betrayed after three months, she held fast under interrogation and twice attempted to escape. After a transfer to a German prison and ten months in shackles, she was executed in Dachau concentration camp. Her statue in London was the UK’s first memorial to a Muslim woman.

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Dead Ladies Show NYC #3

I am very pleased to present the third edition of the DEAD LADIES SHOW in NYC, coming at you on Wednesday, 2 January, from 7:00-9:00pm at the KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street).

We’ll be kicking off the New Year in style, with presentations about a radical suffragist, a forward-thinking sculptor, and a former sex worker turned activist. Presented by socialist feminist biologist ALEXANDRA WALLING, female-artist-focused critic HALL W. ROCKEFELLER, and editor extraordinaire BRIA SANDFORD, with the occasional interjection by your host, MOLLY O’LAUGHLIN. Join us as we greet 2019 with a dose of Dead Ladies—good for the body and soul.

Free admission; please buy a drink or two to ensure the future of DLS NYC at KGB.

Sylvia Pankhurst

SYLVIA PANKHURST was an artist, suffragette, communist, anti-fascist, pacifist, newspaper editor, and tireless crusader for justice. A co-founder of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, she soon abandoned the bourgeois organization to focus on poor, working women and advocate for pacifism during WWI; after the war, she became a communist and avowed anti-fascist. In 1944, Pankhurst helped found Ethiopia’s first teaching hospital, and she later moved to the country as a guest of the Emperor. When she died in 1960, she was given a state funeral and burial in Addis Ababa’s Holy Trinity church—the only foreigner ever awarded such an honor.

Eva Hesse

Artist EVA HESSE survived the Holocaust, but succumbed to brain cancer thirty-one years later, which is the textbook definition of unfair. Despite this, she made more of her thirty-four years on Earth than most people make of lifetimes double that length. She changed the way art is made forever (how many people can say that?), pioneering the movement that would become known as post-minimalism. She made simple sculptures whose structures belied the chaos within, captivating the art world by the time she was in her late twenties. Eva Hesse may be the most important sculptor of the 20th century. (No, this writer does not consider Duchamp a sculptor, and yes, she did consider Rodin for this distinction.)

Andrea Dworkin

Radical feminist ANDREA DWORKIN is somewhat inaccurately famous for claiming, “all sex is rape,” but the arguments she actually made in the 1970s-1990s were no less controversial. When she crusaded against male dominance and domestic violence in the 1970s through 1990s, conservatives mocked her for being anti-man. When she campaigned unsuccessfully against pornography, liberals vilified her as puritanical and prudish. Yet Dworkin would not be silenced. Drawing on her personal experience as a sex worker and as a survivor of rape, she made it her business to speak, even to shout, on behalf of all abused women in a way that still echoes today.

Last but not least, a quick word about your presenters:

ALEXANDRA WALLING is a PhD student in Comparative Biology, where she studies microbial evolution. When she is not pursuing her studies, she organizes with the Socialist Feminist Working Group of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America.

HALL W. ROCKEFELLER is an art historian and critic. She is the founder of less than half, a website that covers female artists in New York City, including exhibition reviews and interviews with practicing female artists. Visit lessthanhalf.org to subscribe to the newsletter.
BRIA SANDFORD is an editor at Penguin Random House.

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Podcast #18: Elsa Lanchester

The last part of our 4-part special FRANKENFRAUEN miniseries, produced in December 2018 by Susan Stone.

In a special encore presentation, Dead Ladies Show co-founder Florian Duijsens tells the story of Elsa Lanchester, the actress made famous by her role in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein. Recorded live at Bard College Berlin.

Also available on Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Pocket Casts.

Show notes:

Continue reading “Podcast #18: Elsa Lanchester”
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Dead Ladies Show #19

Show number 19 is an all-out fantabulous Frankenstein special… bringing you three terrifyingly impressive dead ladies who led unconventional lives and were all somehow tied up with that genre-defining novel: author Mary Shelley, her mother, Urfeminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and Ada Lovelace, computing innovator (and daughter of Lord Byron). Your presenters for the night will be co-hosts Katy Derbyshire and Florian Duijsens, along with Bard College’s own Professor Laura Scuriatti. Come along and join us in our favorite venue, the ACUD STUDIO, on Tuesday, 27 November at 8 pm.

Presented (just this once) all in English. €5 or €3 reduced entry (free for BCB students/staff). This edition generously supported by Bard College Berlin. Doors open 7:30 pm – come on time to get a good seat and a good drink!

And if you cannot make it this time, check out the new season of our wonderful podcast (produced by Susan Stone), which just kicked off last month and has already seduced a great many listeners with its presentations on genius Marie Skłodowska Curie and novelist Aphra Behn, plus special features on forgotten German doctor, reformer and writer, Anna Fischer-Dückelmann, and almost forgotten photographer Vivian Maier. Listen wherever you get your casts!

625px-RothwellMaryShelley

How could we talk about dead ladies and Frankenstein without the original creator, Mary Shelley? Tutored by her philosopher father, including in story-writing, she may or may not have lost her virginity in a cemetery, to her later husband Percy Shelley. Prompted on a rained-in trip to Lake Geneva in the midst of a positively millennial tangle of relationships, Mary first published Frankenstein anonymously in 1818. She lost three children and numerous close friends and relatives before being widowed at 24. Yet she managed to battle depression and raise her surviving son, writing six more novels, plus travel pieces, articles, and short stories, and living on the proceeds. Mary Shelley was a writer with a radical imagination, a woman who challenged social convention and gave us the gift of science fiction.
Mary_Wollstonecraft_Tate_portrait
Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft died eleven days after Mary Shelley’s birth. Best known for her proto-feminist A Vindication of the Rights of Women, she too was never one to do what was expected of her. After publishing her bestselling rant, she moved to France to watch the Revolution unfold, returning to London in 1795 with an illegitimate child fathered by a useless chancer. Baby Mary was conceived out of wedlock too, but her mother swiftly married the philosopher William Godwin to make up for it. Mary Wollstonecraft earned her own living throughout her life, as a lady’s companion, schoolteacher, tutor, and most successfully as a writer of novels, reviews, and philosophical tracts on education. She now has an asteroid in her name.
Ada_Lovelace
Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, one of Mary Shelley’s tight circle of friends present on that fateful stay in Switzerland. Her distant mother, pissed off by her husband abandoning her shortly after the birth, raised Ada to take an interest in mathematics. She built a set of wings in the hope of flying at the age of 12 and became an accomplished mathematician. As an adult, she translated an Italian paper on a proposed machine, the Analytical Engine, which would have been the first computer. Adding notes three times as long as the original, she went ahead and invented the first computer program. Ada Lovelace has sparked imaginations ever since, becoming a popular feminist figure with hundreds of things named after her, including a computer language.
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Podcast #14: Aphra Behn & Vivian Maier

Episode 2 of our new season, produced and presented in November 2018 by Susan Stone.

Translator extraordinaire (and DLS co-founder) Katy Derbyshire tells us all about Aphra Behn, the first woman author who lived off her writing. Additionally, our podcast producer Susan Stone visits a new Berlin exhibition of work by the mysterious photographer Vivian Maier and tries to pin down just who took these pictures and how she would feel about them becoming public.

Also available on Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Pocket Casts.

Show notes:

Continue reading “Podcast #14: Aphra Behn & Vivian Maier”

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Dead Ladies Show NYC #2

It is with great pleasure we invite you to the sophomore outing of the DEAD LADIES SHOW in NYC, back by popular demand! Please join us at the KGB Bar on Wednesday, 7 November, from 7:00-9:00pm.

The very special second NYC edition brings you not just your usual three ladies, but an extra bonus LIVING lady as well—we are thrilled to welcome AMY PADNANI to the stage to talk about her superlative NYT series, “Overlooked,” the reading of which has been described by some as akin to attending the Dead Ladies Show, except in the comfort of your own home and far better established.

The incredible women being posthumously presented include a suffragist hiker, a queer star of the Harlem Renaissance, and the first woman to run for U.S. President. The perfect dénouement from Election Day, if you ask us. (Everybody vote!) Presented by editorial guru HELEN RICHARD, rare researcher LIA BOYLE, and your host, MOLLY O’LAUGHLIN. Join us as we raise a glass to these glass-ceiling-shatterers.

Free admission; please buy a drink or two to ensure the future of DLS NYC at KGB.

(N.B.: once up the outside stairs of the building, enter and climb one more flight of stairs, then take a hard right and enter the bar. We are not in the Red Room, which is yet another flight up! We do not need to hike more elevation! We are not all Fanny Bullock Workman!)

Fanny Bullock Workman

An American hiker, cyclist, explorer, geographer, adventurer, and author born in 1859, FANNY BULLOCK WORKMAN was one of the first female professional mountaineers. She and her husband cycled thousands of miles across Europe, Algeria, and India, and were the first Americans to explore the Himalayas in depth. Workman set several women’s altitude records, published eight travel books, insisted on a new precedent for accurate scientific record-keeping, and championed women’s rights and women’s suffrage every step of the way.

Gladys Bentley

GLADYS BENTLEY was a blues singer, pianist and entertainer in the Harlem Renaissance. A Black lesbian, she started her career as a crossdressing pianist and singer at a gay speakeasy called Harry Hansberry’s Clam House, and she was so popular that the club was soon renamed after her. Her combination of musical talent with a raunchy sense of humor and flamboyant queerness wowed audiences of all races and classes. Langston Hughes called her “an amazing exhibition of musical energy…a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm.”

Victoria Woodhull

Once called “Mrs. Satan,” VICTORIA CLAFLIN WOODHULL was the first woman to run for president—announcing her bid in 1870, 50 years before women had the right to vote. Disowned by the suffragettes for her radical ideas—that women should be able to choose whom they love, that marital rape should be illegal, and that birth control should be widely available—she was far ahead of her time. Among many other achievements, she was the first woman to address a congressional committee and one of the first female brokers on Wall Street.

Helen Richard is an associate editor at G. P. Putnam’s Sons and a moderately aspirational female mountaineer.

Molly O’Laughlin is a writer and translator who recently moved back to NYC from Berlin, Germany.

Lia Boyle studies rare genetic disorders and directs plays in her spare time.

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Podcast #13: Marie Skłodowska Curie & Anna Fischer-Dückelmann

Episode 1 of our new season, produced and presented in October 2018 by Susan Stone.

Professor Agata Lisiak teaches us all about the world’s most famous physicist, Marie Skłodowska Curie. And writer David Wagner talks briefly about a forgotten German doctor, reformer and writer, Anna Fischer-Dückelmann.

Also available on Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Pocket Casts. You can download the transcript here.

Show notes:

Continue reading “Podcast #13: Marie Skłodowska Curie & Anna Fischer-Dückelmann”

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Dead Ladies Show NYC #1

Many of you have heard the good news—one of Berlin’s favorite institutions, the Dead Ladies Show, is coming to NYC! Molly O’Laughlin will be hosting an intimate, informative evening in which we learn about the lives of three deceased, fabulous women from three living—but equally fabulous—presenters. Join us at the KGB Bar on Wednesday, September 5, from 7–9pm.

The time is ripe—dead ladies are all around us, including in the New York Times’s “Overlooked,” a collection of belated obituaries for those non-white men whose contributions to society over the centuries have gone…overlooked. This will be like that, except live, with slideshows (and social drinking).

Bring friends! Bring acquaintances! Bring strangers! No admission this time (yay, first round!); please buy a drink or two to ensure the future of DLS NYC at KGB.

P.S. Got a dead lady you’d like to present in the future? Get in touch! Three rules: 1. Ladies must have been dead at least a year. 2. Ladies must have identified as ladies in their lifetimes. 3. No fascists.

Dorothy Day

DOROTHY DAY was a journalist, social activist, and political radical in New York in the 20th century. During the Great Depression, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist and social justice movement comprised of direct aid for the poor and nonviolent political action on their behalf. The Catholic Worker Movement continues to be active throughout the world. Day is a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church.

Rosalind Franklin

ROSALIND FRANKLIN’s research helped elucidate the structure of DNA, the molecule that determines the growth, development and reproduction of all living things. She was a chemist and an expert in X-ray crystallography, a technique that generates atomic level structures. Her results were essential in Watson & Crick’s final model of DNA, but the data was shared without her consent, even without her knowledge. Franklin turned her attention to studying viruses, visualizing the first viral atomic structures and studying the structure of polio. At age 38, she passed away from ovarian cancer, possibly due to her prolonged research with X-rays. During her lifetime, fellow scientists recognized her valuable work on coal structures and viruses. However, her essential work on DNA was only recently recognized. Now, she’s received many posthumous honors, including having a medical school and an asteroid named after her.

Ann Lowe

ANN LOWE dressed pirate queens, American royalty and silver screen starlets during her career that spanned over 50 years. Born in the south, to a long line of dressmakers, she took over the family business at the age of 16 by designing a gown for the Governor of Alabama’s wife. She worked her way from Alabama to a studio on Madison Avenue. Her work is featured in museums around the country, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Through the course of ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN’s life, she went from Quaker schoolteacher in Indiana to master cryptanalyst whose work laid the foundations for the NSA. She went up against Shakespeare conspiracy theorists, rumrunners, and even J. Edgar Hoover. Her work in World War II helped prevent the Nazis from taking over South America, but nearly all of it was a national secret until after her death.

Your presenters:
Mary Kate Skehan has worked in publishing for five years and currently works in marketing at Penguin.

Chioma Madubata will earn her MD/PhD from Columbia in 2019. She studied cancer biology during her PhD. She got her start with dead ladies early, having attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Maryland.

Candace Munroe’s career in fashion has taken her to Gilt, Bloomingdale’s, and Eileen Fisher. Having earned a master’s in business from NYU Stern, she now works at Tommy Hilfiger.

Molly O’Laughlin is a writer and translator who recently moved back to NYC from Berlin, Germany.