The Music of Change

Happy New Year to you, as we raise the curtain on our 25th Year of operation!

We have a range of events planned for significant dates during this celebratory year, and hope these will provide a chance to meet many of you and to help us focus a spotlight on the value of investment in the empowerment of women.

But who am I?  My name is Anne Frankenberg, and after 15 years of working in opera production, I’ve jumped sectors to work for IWDA as Strategic Partnerships Manager.  It was a move which surprised many of my former colleagues, but for me it was a chance to explore a longstanding interest in social justice, particularly for women.

It is an exciting time to join this field – there is a sense of excitement in the sector, of reaching a tipping point in collective awareness of the importance of investing in women, through the popularity and impact of works such as Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky, and through the increasingly repeated acknowledgement from those in leadership of its importance.  Last week Hillary Clinton gave an address which included the following declaration:

“We are focusing more of our investments on those most responsible for growing the world’s food, caring for the world’s sick, and raising the world’s children: women and girls.

Women and girls are one of the world’s greatest untapped resources and a terrific return on investment. Studies have shown that when a woman receives even just one year of schooling, her children are less like die in infancy or suffer from illness or hunger — and they’re more likely to go to school themselves. And one reason that microfinance is ubiquitous around the world is because women have proven to be such a safe and reliable credit risk. “

Now feels like a great time to become one of a growing chorus of voices telling this story.

I have found surprising parallels between performing arts organisations and those in international development: both contain highly dedicated individuals passionate about the work of the organisation, and who often work to achieve great things with scant resources.

My role at IWDA involves finding ways of telling the stories of our partners and the women they work with. Opera also has storytelling at its core, via a medium which can heighten emotion and extract strong symbolic resonances through the viscerally evocative power of music.

In opera, women often meet terrible fates, but are also frequently agents of change, and often have a strong sense of their own power (even if it leads them on destructive courses, like Carmen). One of the most powerful new works I’ve been involved with, Richard Mills and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale, directed by Lindy Hume, retold the ancient Greek myth of Procne and Philomel. It dealt with the price of using violence to silence a woman’s voice, with a terrible inevitable outcome when women seized power and retaliated. It conveyed a powerful message and was a riveting and challenging piece of theatre.

The stories I hear from the IWDA partners can be no less emotionally harrowing. At one point during the recent Asia-Pacific Breakthrough Summit, as a Solomon Islands woman named Ruth related simply but insistently the constant struggle to balance competing demands, keep a voice for women and protect and care for her own daughter who became a mother at fourteen, I looked around and realised that not a single person in the audience was unaffected.

A further inspirational story was that of Naomi Yupae, who used an opportunity to speak from a pulpit in her Papua New Guinea Eastern Highlands church to speak out for the women of her community who were suffering violence.

The difference in my new world is that the stories that we tell are real.

Anne
Strategic Partnerships Manager
International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA)

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 under Media, Recent.