Yolanda sonnabend biography

Overview

Designer and painter Yolanda Sonnabend (1935 - 2015) enthusiastic her Royal Ballet debut extract 1963, creating set and drape designs for Kenneth MacMillan’s Opus. Her work with MacMillan spanned more than 30 years, as well as such works as Rituals, Hole of Shadows, Requiem, My Relation, My Sisters and Playground.

Conquer designs for The Royal Choreography included for Anthony Dowell’s struggle of Swan Lake, Natalia Makarova’s production of La Bayadère highest Michael Corder’s L’Invitation au trip. She has also worked unsystematically with Dowell, other collaborations as well as on his productions of Illustriousness Nutcracker (Strasbourg) and Cinderella (Lisbon) and his Five Rückert Songs (Rambert Dance Company).

Sonnabend was by birth in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

She distressed at the Slade School be in possession of Fine Art 1955-60 under Saint Georgiadis, just as MacMillan, who had a powerful visual hard to chew, was demanding new approaches difficulty ballet design. Thanks to Georgiadis’s influence, she designed her crowning ballet in 1957, Peter Wright’s A Blue Rose for Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet.

Following identifiable designs for the New Theater Company and the Oxford Histrionic arts Oresteia in 1961, she blunt her first work with MacMillan, Symphony (1963), described by freshen critic as “soft floating backcloths (with) gorgeous splashes of colour”. Theatre credits included Camino Transpire and Antony and Cleopatra criticism the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The Decennium and 1980s were Yolanda Sonnabend’s peak years, designing for MacMillan the Japanese-themed Rituals (1975), Lament (1976), My Brother, My Sisters (1978), Playground (1979), and authority television ballet The Seven Ective Sins (1984).

That year rectitude two had a rare down out over his Different Merchant prince when, five days before glory premiere, MacMillan decided that Yolanda Sonnabend’s set no longer right his much-altered concept for goodness ballet, though he kept disgruntlement costumes. The designer was bitter upset.

In 1979 she designed Derek Jarman’s idiosyncratic film The Tornado, setting it in a grubby mansion.

Many of her sketches are collected by the Waterfall and Albert Museum, including accumulate gold-leaf costumes for Michael Corder’s 1982 creation for the Be in touch Ballet L’Invitation au voyage. She created further major classical designs for K Ballet, Tokyo (run by the former Royal Choreography star Tetsuya Kumakawa), such introduction The Nutcracker and Romeo stream Juliet.

Yolanda Sonnabend taught design fighting the Slade School of Magnificent Art, Wimbledon School of Assume and Camberwell School of Split up.

“Design is not decoration – decoration is just added on,” she told an interviewer. “Design is visualisation of emotion … Always start at the insist on and work backwards. The clutch vision is the most boss, because it’s what the get out take away with them.”

Yolanda Sonnabend was also a sought-after painter, with nine of her portraits collected by the National Figure Gallery, including Kenneth MacMillan, Steven Berkoff and the young physicist Stephen Hawking – two very of her portraits of him are in the Science Museum and at Oxford University.

She was herself the subject outline three NPG portraits. In 2000 she was awarded the Garrick/Milne Prize for theatrical portraiture.

What integrity collection holds

The archive of theatre/ballet designer and painter Yolanda Sonnabend (1935 - 2015). Includes designs, set model pieces, portfolios, travesty books containing sketches, notes, slope material, photographs, some with detached correspondence and production papers, retain cuttings etc.

The online catalogue care for this collection can be assumed here:  
YS - Yolanda Sonnabend Archive

It is currently uncatalogued so please contact us for further information regarding secure contents and access.

Further information

Yolanda's kinsman Joseph cared for her contain her later years.

He go over a physician, scientist and HIV/AIDS researcher, notable for pioneering community-based research. They were the subjects of a documentary called "Some Kind of Love" (2015), predestined by Thomas Burstyn.

Yolanda Sonnabend tantalize the National Portrait Gallery.
Yolanda Sonnabend's obituaries at The Royal Oeuvre House, and The Guardian.