You might not be familiar with her name, but you’ve almost certainly marvelled at some of her work. Nadia Raibin is the woman who puts the “show” into “business”. Her company, Mass Movement, provides the choreographers and creative directors who make the world’s biggest entertainment events — from X Factor, to the Rugby World Cup Final — each one a seamless spectacle. If fashion designers Dolce & Gabanna want to put on a VIP, star-studded party, it’s Raibin they call.
She’s come a long way for a Jewish girl from St John’s Wood. Born in the 1950s, she attended Camden School for Girls and opted not to go to university, instead taking a job at a below-the-line promotions company. Already displaying an entrepreneurial spirit at the age of just 19, she quickly decided to quit and open her own company.
“After a short period of time, I thought ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this for someone else, I can do this for myself,’” she recalls. “So, I went to see a bank manager — his name was, believe it or not, Mr Cash — and I opened my first business at 55 New Bond Street, above Smythson. I employed hundreds and hundreds of girls from there.” She laughs. “There was no impropriety, of course.”
At 21, she teamed up with one of her “girls”, Barbara Mason, to open another company based from the latter’s home in Maida Vale, where they still work today. It was then that, using characteristic chutzpah, Raibin made the leap into fashion shows. “A lovely client, whom you may have heard of, called Nike, rang up and asked if we could provide some promotions girls. Then they asked if I knew anyone who did fashion shows. And I said, ‘Yes, of course we do them,’ having never done a fashion show in our lives. And that’s really where it began.”
Soon she was running a global fashion show production company, with a USP — it employed dancers and choreographers, not just models. In 2007, one of the dancers — the fantastically-named Christian Storm — asked Nadia if she’d like to form a company with him, taking show business to big business, and Mass Movement was born. The company’s first achievement was to bring pre-match entertainment to the UK, making large sporting events, like the FA Cup Final, more family-friendly affairs. The corporate guests saw what she’d done, and started booking her too.
Ten years on, and Mass Movement has cornered the market in choreographing large scale events. Boasting both a production arm and an agency arm, which Nadia says complement one another, the company is uniquely able to create events in both the entertainment and corporate worlds, using the same talent pool and skillset to choreograph, for example, TV show Britain’s Got Talent, or an event for a client such as Heineken, or a trade fair.
“We’re couture,” says Raibin. “We have a fantastic name. We’re sort of the best-kept secret in town, which is great, because we work with a lot of high-profile clients. Every single day and every single job is different. Our ethos is: ‘Live, but not dangerous.’ We have the very best people — the best lighting director, best health and safety manager, best pyrotechnician, best florist… and you’re always in the safest of hands. The secret to our success is our contacts book, the people we bring — literally — to the party.”
Nadia grew up in the Reform community, attending the West London Synagogue. “My dad used to go to synagogue every Saturday, swiftly followed by a drink at the Dorchester,” she recalls. “We were anglicised Jews, but quite traditional and respectful of high days and holidays. Obviously, my brother was barmitzvahed.”
Married in Dunston Road shul, Nadia now lives in Hampstead, with a second home in Spain, and has two children and two grandchildren, all of whom live “six minutes away”. As far as synagogues are concerned, she hasn’t moved far; she’s now a member of the Western Marble Arch Synagogue. Judaism is a big part of her life, although she doesn’t call herself Orthodox. “It’s all about family for us. Friday nights are very important — my chicken soup is legendary. We go to synagogue for the festivals. We’re traditional and we’ve brought up the children with Jewish values. My daughter-in-law actually converted to Judaism.”
She can’t pick a career highlight. There was the four-day event in Portofino for Dolce and Gabbana, which involved creating an upside-down Midsummer Night’s Dream, with grape vines growing upwards and angels playing harps in the trees, plus several catwalk shows, a five-course dinner and huge party, with hundreds of models, dancers and musicians. Or Martini’s 150th anniversary on Lake Como, with a floating stage and performances by Lily Allen and Mark Ronson. Or the party for the owner of H&M featuring Nile Rodgers and Chic, with the King and Queen of Sweden in attendance… “I could go on and on,” she says.
Has anything ever gone wrong? “Oh, of course!” she teases. “But I’m not going to tell you. You think on your feet, don’t you? You are in control of every aspect of an event, from the grassroots, all the way through development, creativity, and then, ultimately, a successful delivery. Along the way, there’s all sorts of things that can happen, and that you just deal with. And you minimise the impact it has on anything else. If you know what you’re doing, nobody other than you and your close team will ever know anything was other than perfect.”
“And you will perhaps experience what to do when 500 members of the Army, who you’ve used to do something on the pitch at Wembley Stadium, have inadvertently eaten the 300 children’s packed lunches — with all the chaperones threatening to take all of the children home on the bus. Which might have happened.”
Raibin shows no signs of slowing down. “We are expanding the company, we’re taking on lots more talent, and our client base is increasing. We always say, ‘We’re only ever as good as the last job we do,’ so we make sure that our last job is our best job. I love what I’ve done. I’m very fortunate that it’s given me such freedom, and that it’s allowed me to see the world, and to meet some incredible people.”
Why does she think there are so many Jews in show business? “I think it’s because we’ve got such a great sense of humour — we’ve needed it to survive. Perhaps it’s because we know how to laugh at ourselves.”
