Change Happens Through Shared Joy – URSULA YOVICH SINGS NINA SIMONE
Ursula Yovich has never been an artist who slips quietly into another person’s voice. When she steps into the world of Nina Simone, she does not imitate, she enters a conversation that moves across continents, histories and emotional registers. In this new tribute, Yovich sits beside Simone in spirit, listening for the fire, the tenderness and the deep humanity that shaped one of the most singular musical legacies of the twentieth century. What emerges is not an act of mimicry but a meeting place, where two artists speak through rhythm, phrasing and breath.
Yovich reflects on Nina’s blend of fury and vulnerability, on the emotional truths held inside songs that have carried generations of listeners, and on the ways her own lived experience echoes and diverges from Simone’s.
This tribute is also a reckoning with voice, power and survival. In Yovich’s hands, Simone’s music becomes a space for connection, honesty and the complexity of being an artist who carries both personal and collective histories.
You are not impersonating Nina Simone, you are entering into a kind of conversation with her. If you imagine Nina sitting at the piano beside you, what do you think she would challenge you on in your interpretation?
Nina has such a unique voice it would be near impossible to impersonate her. But she is the queen of interpretation and I think she would enjoy people performing the songs that are so synonymous with her in their own special way. I believe Nina would revel in music interpretations.
Nina’s catalogue walks a tightrope between vulnerability and fury. Is there a particular song where you feel your own story suddenly pushes forward and almost takes over from hers?
I think her collection of songs is the soundtrack for many black peoples. The feelings of fury over injustice and the vulnerability of having to feel those injustices and live them. It’s strength but a pleading to the listeners that she too is flesh and blood. We are same, same but different.
You are weaving Black and Blak histories together in this work. Was there a moment in research or rehearsal when you felt a shock of recognition, where something from Nina’s world uncannily echoed your own?
I don’t like to think of this show as a weaving of two historical pains. I prefer to say it’s a meeting place of two artists and their love of music and their peoples. Artists who record the emotional histories through song and music, through rhythm and lyrics and voice.
Songs like “Mississippi Goddam” were written for a very specific political moment. How do you decide whether to lean into that original context or to reframe it in terms of the current realities faced by First Nations people here?
I won’t be performing Mississippi Goddam. This is so specific to the history of the black/African American. I wouldn’t feel comfortable to reframe a song with the title Mississippi Goddamn. In another iteration of this show I would respond to her song with one of my own songs.
As a storyteller, you have always moved between music, theatre and television. What can you express about power and survival through Nina’s songs that you cannot express as directly in spoken roles?
One of the gifts I have… which I believe Nina embodies, is that we are able to connect with our audiences on a human and emotional level. Nina’s songs and her interpretations are amazing but it’s her voice that holds power and vulnerability, her voice has this ability to express subtext, what she is feeling and thinking without explicitly spelling it out. So although I love her songs it’s her voice that is compelling to me. How much can I say without words?
How did you work with your band to avoid simply recreating classic arrangements, while still honouring the spine of what makes those songs so unmistakably hers?
I have a talented group of people accompanying me. These musicians not only love Nina but they love play and discovery. They are magicians when it comes to conveying a feeling through music and soundscape…
Nina Simone spoke openly about rage, mental health and the cost of being an artist in a racist world. When you step offstage after singing her material, what do you do to look after your own spirit and nervous system?
We all struggle with our demons. I guess the thing most people don’t get or realise is that Aboriginal people also deal with a collective demon. I have my personal challenges, sometimes I struggle with my mental health. But what I find hard to reconcile with is the rage I feel when I read or experience racism. It’s confusing to me that there are people who exist in our world who hate for no other reason than to hate.
The stage for me is where I can process and bring people into my world. And although it’s important to look after yourself after coming off stage and I do try… it’s hard to find complete freedom from my reality. And that reality is that I cannot escape my Aboriginality. My experience of the world and how I tread through it is determined by this fact. After the No vote I have a little less trust in the humanity of people in general. And the world seems to have reverted to ways of governing that hurt and destroy people instead of uplift.
Do you remember your first real encounter with Nina Simone’s music, the moment where it was no longer just a famous voice but something that lodged in your chest and stayed there?
The first song I heard was “My Baby Just Cares” when it had a revival, I think in the late 80s. I loved it of course. But the song that made me appreciate her and her musicianship and her ability to storytell with her voice was the song “I Don’t Want Him You Can Have Him”, hearing in her this strength and defiance in her voice one moment and then her heart break and vulnerability the next. It’s fascinating to hear. I had never come across a singer who could do that so effortlessly and so heartbreakingly beautifully.
This tribute is also about your own voice. Has spending so much time in Nina’s musical world changed how you hear yourself when you go back to other projects?
I am grateful that I get to do what I do. But everything I do will always have my mark on it. I am honouring Nina and who she was and what she believed and struggled and celebrated but with my voice.
If a young Blak artist in the audience walks away wanting to dive into both Nina’s work and your own, what is the one track, and the one stage role of yours, that you would point them to as a starting point for understanding your shared conversation about resistance?
Not everything is about resistance! Sing our songs but don’t forget your own voice. Write something that feeds your soul. Sometimes change happens through shared joy. And music no matter what the subject is should free people of their restraints. Giving them permission to dance and sing along. To cry out with joy, or to sob in pain.
URSULA YOVICH SINGS NINA SIMONE is playing as part of Sydney Festival.
For more information and tickets CLICK HERE
