Yolanda Sonnabend was born to a German-Jewish father and Russian mother in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1935. She was most famous for the innovative designs she produced for the choreographer and Royal Ballet director Kenneth MacMillan. Also an accomplished painter, she exhibited at the Whitechapel and Serpentine Galleries in London, among others and was awarded the Garrick/Milne Prize for theatrical portraiture in 2000.
Stage designer and painter Yolanda Sonnabend was born in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1935 to a Jewish sociologist father of German descent and his wife, a Russian-born doctor. Her parents met as students in Padua, Italy and moved to Rhodesia in 1930. Sonnabend studied at L'École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Geneva (1951), McGill University, Montreal (1952), and Rome University (1953), moving to England in 1954 to further her art studies at the Slade School of Fine Art (1955–60). Here she came under the influence of Robert Medley, who had established the theatre design course, and trained under Nicholas Georgiadis and Peter Snow. Following Georgiadis's influence, she designed her first ballet in 1957, Peter Wright's A Blue Rose for Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet. Wright and Sonnabend both joined the Edinburgh International Ballet, established to perform specially commissioned ballets, for which they created The Great Peacock (1958).
In 1963 she began her collaboration with renowned choreographer and Royal Ballet director, Kenneth MacMillan, creating sets and costumes for his Symphony. Their special relationship led to a series of experimental productions. Sonnabend considered ballet a powerful visual medium, 'like moving sculpture' (The Guardian 1975, p. 11), and from 1975 and over the next decade, she designed innovative sets and costumes for ten of MacMillan’s ballets. For his disturbing My Brother, My Sisters (1978), partly inspired by the Brontës, Sonnabend designed a series of gauzes painted and lit to evoke the Yorkshire moors while the sisters appeared in childish dresses. The whole ballet, which also involved the use of masks, evoked German expressionism. Sonnabend's meticulous research for Playground (1979), the title of which refers to an asylum, led her to visit Friern Barnet mental institution. Inspired by the wire fencing, graffiti, and rubbish she saw there, she created the set of a bleakly depressing recreation ground. MacMillan and Sonnabend briefly interrupted their collaboration in 1984 when, five days before the premiere of Different Drummer, MacMillan scrapped her set design. Although Sonnabend was bitterly upset, her respect for him did not diminish. In Requiem (1986), Sonnabend's costumes, based on Vesalius's anatomical studies and William Blake's corporeal drawings, included Lycra body-tights, on which torsos were painted with striations to represent veins and muscles. Her creations for the Royal Ballet included opulent versions of classics, most notably Natalia Makarova’s production of La Bayadère, Anthony Dowell's Nutcracker, Cinderella and a gothic, fantastical Swan Lake. Although the latter was controversial when first presented, it survived in the Royal Ballet’s repertory for 30 years.
Sonnabend was able to exhibit her designs in many contexts, including with Ben Uri where her work featured in Jewish Stage and Film Designers in 1999 and in the survey The Ben Uri Story: From Art Society to Museum presented at Phillips Auctioneers in 2001. She was also an accomplished painter and sought-after portraitist, and in 2000 was awarded the Garrick/Milne Prize for theatrical portraiture. In an interview for the Guardian in 1975, she commented: 'I've always been in the funny position of being both a painter and a stage designer, though in this country if you want people to take you seriously you've got to be one thing or the other' (The Guardian 1975). In the same year she showed paintings inspired by old photographs of her parents in Padua at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, commenting: 'though most of them are of my mother, I wanted them to be detached, as if they were of anyone's mother. I wanted them to be shown behind several layers of glass, so you could see yourself reflected on them' (The Guardian 1975). Other exhibitions followed, including at the Gilbert Parr Gallery (1977), a major retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery (1985) and at the Decorative Antiques and Design and Textiles Fair in Battersea Park, where she exhibited ballet designs, coloured costumes sketches and paintings (2004). Sonnabend taught design at the Slade School of Fine Art, Wimbledon School of Art, and Camberwell School of Art. In her last years, she developed dementia and was looked after by her brother, Joseph, who was a practising physician. This deep relationship between siblings was portrayed in the 2015 film Some Kind of Love.
Yolanda Sonnabend died in a care centre in London, England on 9 November 2015. Her work is held widely in the UK public domain, including in the Arts Council Collection, Wellcome Collection and University College London Art Collection. The National Portrait Gallery holds nine of her portraits, including of Kenneth MacMillan; the actor and director, Steven Berkoff; and the young physicist Stephen Hawking. Two further portraits of Hawking are held by the Science Museum and the University of Oxford. Among her many sketches collected by the Victoria and Albert Museum are gold-leaf costumes for Michael Corder's 1982 creation for the Royal Ballet L'Invitation au Voyage. Sonnabend's archive is held at the Theatre Collection of the University of Bristol.