Following an award-winning debut at Edinburgh Fringe and the release of her critically acclaimed debut solo album, BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winner Rowan Rheingans tours her courageous new solo show ‘Dispatches on the Red Dress’.
Rowan Rheingans is an award-winning fiddle player, banjoist, songwriter and theatre-maker widely regarded as one of the foremost innovators in folk music today. Best known for her work with acclaimed bands Lady Maisery, The Rheingans Sisters and Songs of Separation, Rowan has won two BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards (‘Best Original Track’ in 2016 & ‘Best Album’ in 2017) and is a six-times nominee. Her duo The Rheingans Sisters were also nominees for the prestigious ‘Best Duo/Band’ award at the the 2019 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.
This March and April, Rowan takes this ambitious and deeply personal one-woman show on a national tour (dates below).
An intimate and adventurous exploration of memory, identity, joy, sorrow, trauma-recovery, war and waltzes, Dispatches on the Red Dress tells the true story of Rowan’s German grandmother’s youth in 1940s Germany. With genre-melding fluidity, Rowan weaves immersive storytelling around 10 new songs (Rowan won ‘Best Original Track’ at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2016 for her song Mackerel) performed live with fiddle, banjo, guitar and subtly inventive use of pre-recorded sounds.
In the current time of deeply felt political tensions, with the rise of racism in our communities and a new nationalistic fervour gaining pace across Europe, Dispatches on the Red Dress is a highly resonant and much needed historic provocation for our current political and social climate. Slowly revealing what is at once a warm family story and a troubling elegy on the modern human condition, Rowan explores how hope for the future may be found in the very darkest pockets of our history…
“Sublime…a narrative stitched with the subtlety of an expert dressmaker…
celebrates family, nature and the ties that bind and goes on to pack a fierce political punch.”
The Guardian (Folk Album of the Month) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-44htwCzcek
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