Now in its 11th year, the All About Women 2023 festival will once again be on at Sydney Opera House this Saturday, March 11 through to Monday, March 13. This year’s line-up of 25 events features more than 60 international and Australian artists, thinkers, and storytellers, including Jenette McCurdy, Clementine Ford, and Rosie Waterland.
The festival will explore big ideas that are important to women, gender-diverse people, and their allies. Through conversations, panels, workshops, and performances, the festival will dig into topics of justice and power, feminism in pop culture, and the body positivity movement.
This year’s festival is co-curated by Dr Amy Thunig, Jane Caro AM, Chip Rolley, and Jamila Rizvi. Rizvi, who has been on the All About Women line-up in the past, says she believes the festival is special in that it brings audiences from all over the country together to hear from women and gender-diverse people.
“For me, All About Women is a celebration first and foremost,” she says. “It’s a chance to celebrate the achievements and the work and the interests of other women, and also to perhaps dive a little deeper into the perspectives that aren’t always going to be shared at a corporate International Women’s Day luncheon.”
Rizvi says that often when it comes to women and gender-diverse people sharing ideas publicly, they’re asked to speak about gender and nothing more. All About Women, on the other hand, puts a gender lens on everything — it isn’t just a festival on women’s topics. It’s a festival about all sorts of topics, with a gender lens taken deliberately to the exploration of those topics.
The session ‘Finding Love in a Hopeless Place’ will see Rosie Waterland, Brooke Blurton, and Nakkiah Lui on a panel discussion. Clementine Ford will join Yves Rees and Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts for a panel discussion on ‘Who Made Me Spokesperson’. And ‘Bodies That Positivity Left Behind’ will feature Deni Todorovic, Sasha Sarago, Tanya Hennessy, April Helene-Horton, and Elly Desmarchelier.
McCurdy, best known for her leading role in “iCarly” and the heartbreaking and hilarious memoir “I’m Glad My Mom Died”, will take the Sydney Opera House stage on Sunday evening. There she’ll dive into her struggles as a former child actor, touching on eating disorders, addiction, and her complicated relationship with her mother, and share how she retook control of her life.
“We started with the themes we wanted to explore and some of the concepts we thought were conversations bubbling away under the surface in the Australian Zeitgeist,” says Rizvi. “Once we had landed the areas of interest that we wanted to cover, we really had some big conversations about the kinds of voices and perspectives that we wanted to platform.”
For Rizvi, that meant adding people with significant profiles to the line-up — “I would listen to them read their shopping lists if they wanted to stand on-stage at the Opera House and read them” — as well as new voices. She said the team ensured the line-up was representative and diverse, and that it offered a range of perspectives.
“There are always commercial and ticket-buying realities to putting on festivals like this, and people who are household names are the ones who tend to sell out,” Rizvi says. “So one of the things I really enjoy about All About Women is we’re able to pair together people who are well-known and command a ticket-buying audience with people who should be better known. We’re also able to make sure audiences are exposed to new voices, too.”
As for what Rizvi wants guests to take away from the festival, she says the feeling of being invigorated, which might look different on different people depending on the event they saw.
“It might be that energy that comes from being in a room of people who are captivated and interested in the same topics you are. It can be the energy that comes from having watched a series of presentations that make you really angry. And it can be the energy of possibility that makes you think about how we’re going to achieve change on things that are really important.”
Sangeeta Kocharekar
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