Acrobatic stars to New Orleans recluses: Film preserves the adventures of sisters Nita and Zita

The world barely noticed when sisters Flora and Piroska Gellert finished their time on it, six years apart, with only the officiating rabbi and a neighbor attending their funerals in the pauper’s section of Hebrew Rest Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans.

But when that neighbor, Betty Kirkland, was given permission to enter the house of the reclusive sisters and sell their belongings, she found a story about two trailblazing Jewish women who traveled the world as acrobatic burlesque dancers, inspiring other performers and creating a treasure trove of art that filled the house on Dauphine Street in the Marigny.

Their story is now being told in the film “The Nita and Zita Project.” On Sept. 19 at 6 p.m., the film will be screened at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans, followed by a talk with filmmakers Marci Darling and Sharon Gillen. There will also be a screening on Sept. 17 at 3:30 p.m. at Tulane University’s Freeman Auditorium.

The sisters left Nagybanya, Hungary, fleeing antisemitism, and immigrated to the United States on The Reliance, arriving at Ellis Island in 1922, just before the U.S. drastically cut back on accepting immigrants. Based out of New York, the new U.S. citizens performed as Nita and Zita, combining burlesque and acrobatics on the way to becoming world famous. With two steamer trunks filled with costumes that they made themselves, they traveled the world, performing in France, Manila, Shanghai, Havana, Buenos Aires and many other locations.

Around 1929, New Orleans became a regular performance stop for them as they toured, and in the 1930s their “home address” was somewhere in New Orleans, changing every so often.

In the 1940s they lived in Arizona for a few years, but little is known of their time there other than real estate records. In 1948 they bought the house in the Marigny and retired. After dancing for a few more years and having a teaching studio for a time, they became recluses.

Devoted to their craft, neither sister ever married. Flora died in 1985, and Piroska died in 1991. After their only living relative gave Kirkland permission to dispose of their things, she found thousands of pieces of handmade clothing throughout the house, their old costumes, hundreds of performance photos, handmade bead curtains, furniture that they had painted with all manner of designs and sponge paint patterns on the walls. This led to an estate sale that lasted five years.

Exploring the mystery

Darling is a bestselling author of mystery novels set in New Orleans who has worked as a professional belly dancer, circus acrobat and burlesque dancer for 20 years. She toured as a dancer with The Go-Go’s, the B-52’s and Paul McCartney, and with numerous famous Middle Eastern performers.

Among her television credits was as the belly dancer for John Boy’s bachelor party in The Waltons TV Special.

She has also written a book about grief, “Divorce Diva: Navigating Grief and Loss with Hope, Humor, and Chutzpah,” after her marriage fell apart, her father died, her mother was lost to dementia and her best friend committed suicide, all within one year starting in 2017.

Darling learned about Nita and Zita in 1997, when she wandered into Judy’s Collage, “this junk treasure shop on Chartres Street” and saw numerous vintage costumes of theirs hanging from the ceiling. “I had been in a bar the night before and saw a picture of them” and was drawn to their vintage look. She “started hearing about them every time I turned around.”

When she returned to Los Angeles, she was taking about her discovery. A New Orleans Oyster dancer came to California to put together a show, and wanted to do an act about Nita and Zita. “I had a burlesque act with my dance partner and best friend,” Kim Murphy, who did contortionist acrobatics, and they incorporated Nita and Zita into their routines, performing the act as Honey and Vermilion every Thursday night at the Viper Room in Hollywood before taking the show worldwide.

Darling would eventually move to New Orleans, where “there was a lot of lore and mythology about them, but there wasn’t any real facts about them. People had heard through the grapevine,” Darling said.

Much more recently, she woke up from a dream and knew she had to tell the story about Nita and Zita. With a lack of source material, she figured it would be a five-minute short filmed on her phone about their impact on artists. It wound up being much more.

Through the New England Genealogical Society, she was able to find their travel manifests. “I just started following all the threads and was completely amazed that I was able to corroborate the stories.”

In January 2023, Darling approached Gillen, who had been looking at a career change, and specifically wanted to connect more deeply with her Jewish ancestry. “So when Marci approached me with this project about these Jewish women, I immediately said yes… This is the project” that she wanted to dedicate her time to. “When I found out that they were actually from the same region of Eastern Europe as my ancestors, I felt it was something I needed to pursue and needed to follow, and it was the universe’s way of showing me my next life step.”

Not only that, after the film was finished they discovered that the sisters’ mother’s last name was the same as some of Gillen’s ancestors. “We’re looking to see if there might be some connection,” Darling said.

For Darling, this film was also a way to honor the memory of her dance partner, Murphy, who died in 2018.

Gillen said “healing through creativity is the theme of the movie.”

Darling noted that the sisters grew up during World War I, lived through the White Terror, were in Shanghai during the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, “they were dancing in Berlin, in Budapest in 1939, and they went through so many horrible things, traumatic things,” but “they never lost their joy, they never stopped dancing, never stopped creating.” Even after they could no longer dance, they kept creating.

She said a little known secret in the world is that the opposite of depression is not joy, it is expression. “Creativity can really help people process and make it through difficult times.”

They continued to do research on the “very cherished New Orleans characters” that people knew very little about. “People had been seeing their items around, loving them and buying them, there are lots of shop owners in the Quarter who kept altars to them, with all their things, and collected their items,” Darling said.

She added that they found people who “saw them as children, who lived in their neighborhood… They did not interact with their neighbors or the community at all, except people saw them walking down the street in their finest.”

Their finest was self-made clothing, as they never just bought something off the rack and wore it. Darling explained that one dress could have been made from 400 pieces, taking found objects and remaking them in their style. “From tin can crowns to tin can belts, cigarette foil rolled up into pom-poms and sewn onto hats… they made everything their own.”

The estate sale ensured their story was spread far and wide, with artists all over the world influenced by their style.

The story was also preserved through a stage show, “Nita & Zita,” written and directed by Lisa D’Amour, with a score by New Orleans jazz pianist Tom McDermott. The show premiered in New Orleans in 2001, then was successful Off-Broadway in New York, winning an OBIE Award. It returned for a couple more engagements in New Orleans in 2005.

In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, New Orleans theater critic Alan Smason coordinated a Zoom broadcast of the show, with the original cast from 15 years earlier.

For Darling, a challenge in doing research was the constant mis-spelling of their names in the press, as well as them using numerous variants of their names, and their father had changed the family name from Grun to Gellert.

But there was definitely source material available, as the sisters saved their flyers and newspaper clippings. “They had newspaper clippings in Hungarian from 1919 that was rave reviews” of their dancing in Transylvania. “A lot of the information is stuff that they kept, which then their neighbor kept,” Darling said. When Kirkland went into a facility because of Alzheimer’s, another neighbor rescued the documents from being thrown out, and they are now at the Historic New Orleans Collection, where they were donated “just at the same time we had started our idea.”

The documents also include tickets from the luxury ships they traveled in, and invitations from the ship captains, as ships used the opportunity for passengers to mingle with celebrities as a selling point. “I could have done a documentary just on the ships,” Darling reflected. One of the ships was the “spectacular” Leviathan, which was famous in the 1920s and whose orchestra released their own album. The sisters also did engagements for months at a time in Panama, which Darling discovered “because they saved the contracts.”

Much of the research is preserved on their website, nitazitaproject.com, and Darling is writing a piece for the Southern Jewish Historical Society’s journal.

The film premiered in March at the Salem Film Festival, and it has started winning awards on the film festival circuit. It also had a sold-out screening at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

It will be at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival in November and a possible Arkansas screening in February.

“It’s a scrappy little tale, so quirky and fun,” Gillen said. As first-time filmmakers, they are currently exploring distribution.

“The drive to make (the film) was to tell the story of outsider artists, marginalized women. It’s a very unusual story that was so inspiring to so many people,” Darling said.

Gillen added that after October 7, “I feel so fortunate to have found this Jewish story to talk about… it is so important to tell Jewish stories, now more than ever.”

Darling noted that one other result of the movie is “smashing the stereotypes of Jewish stories, dancer stories, women’s stories, artist stories. Artists are greatly underappreciated in our world.”

The MSJE screening is $5 for members, $10 for non-members.