Cover Xuan Cheng in Hong Kong Ballet’s ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of SWKit and Hong Kong Ballet)
Xuan Cheng in Hong Kong Ballet’s ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of SWKit and Hong Kong Ballet)
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‘Frida’, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s ballet production which will have its Asia premiere this month, takes the audience into the rich imaginations of surrealist artist Frida Kahlo
In 2015, Belgian Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa was given a list of suggestions by Tamara Rojo, then artistic director of English National Ballet (ENB), who commissioned her—along with two other female choreographers Yabin Wang and Aszure Barton—to create She Said, a triple bill comprising short narrative ballets based on women from literature or history. “[They] had to be damned and doomed. There were about seven names to choose from, including Medusa and Lady Macbeth,” Ochoa recalls. “But I kept thinking: Frida Kahlo.”
The Mexican artist was affected by polio as a child and suffered serious injuries in a bus accident when she was 18, which affected her mobility for the rest of her life—perhaps not a natural choice for the subject of a dance. But Ochoa doesn’t believe in presenting stories in a straightforward manner—instead of strapping her principal dancer into a wheelchair, she decided to take the audience into Kahlo’s inner world. “I want to show the audience that while Kahlo is restricted in her movements, her spirit is not restricted at all,” says Ochoa. “What inspired me is that this woman transformed her pain into art and something bigger than herself. She became a legacy and her experience [is] universal.”
Above Frida and her imaginary animal and plant characters in ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of Dutch National Opera & Ballet)
Frida and her imaginary animal and plant characters in ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of Dutch National Opera & Ballet)
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Originally premiering as a 45-minute ballet called Broken Wings for ENB at London’s Sadler Wells in 2016 and subsequently expanded into a full-length version titled Frida which was shown in Amsterdam in 2020 and earlier this year in Phoenix in the US, Ochoa’s work has mesmerised global audiences with its vivid presentation of Kahlo’s story.
The show comes to Hong Kong next month for its Asia premiere with the Hong Kong Ballet from April 4 to 6. Ochoa is refining the story line, removing members of Kahlo’s family that appeared in the previous versions and keeping only her teenhood boyfriend Alejandro Gómez Arias, husband Diego Rivera and sister Cristina Kahlo—the people who had the greatest impact on her short life.
Above ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of Dutch National Opera & Ballet)
‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of Dutch National Opera & Ballet)
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While the performance portrays some of the events in the artist’s life, Ochoa says the audience “mostly see how she feels”: the show brings to life her paintings, portraits, imaginary friends and the symbols in her art, such as deer, birds and her male alter egos. “I reversed her process of turning life into a painting. I brought her painting into life instead,” she says. “Frida is more a journey through her paintings than a biopic.”
Kahlo was revolutionary in many ways, and while she didn’t like to be labelled a feminist and her subjects were mostly personal, her paintings demonstrated a feistiness and displayed an often-overshadowed female perspective on society and life in the art industry, which was dominated by male painters. Take for instance The Wounded Deer, a 1946 oil painting in which she portrayed herself as a bleeding stag pierced by nine arrows; in the corner of the canvas, she wrote the word Carma, the Spanish for “karma”.
That year, she had undergone a surgery in New York that was supposed to end the severe pain she still suffered after the bus accident that broke her spine and punctured her uterus and abdomen; it failed. When she returned to Mexico after the surgery, she suffered both physical pain and depression; The Wounded Deer expressed her pain, desperation and lack of control of her fate, after a failed surgery in New York.
Above Frida and the deer character in ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of Dutch National Opera & Ballet)
Frida and the deer character in ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of Dutch National Opera & Ballet)
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“She felt persecuted by life, by karma,” Ochoa says, referring to her accident and, later in life, three miscarriages. “Why did this all happen to her?” Inspired by this, the choreographer includes the deer in scenes where Kahlo is lonely and wants to be free of her pain. There’s also the bird character inspired by Kahlo’s pet parrots that appear frequently in self-portraits as her protective friends. She further created a character of the queen of leaves and vines that highlights Kahlo’s love of nature. “I have these three characters—the deer, the bird and the plants—that are around her and accompany her through the scenes.”
Despite her circumstances, Kahlo was far from self-pitying and didn’t shy away from presenting the most fragile, honest version of herself. A Few Small Nips (1935), in which a woman’s twisted and bloodied body lies naked on a bed with a man standing next to her, doesn’t only confront viewers with the gruesome scene; it also lays bare her feelings towards her husband’s affair with her sister Cristina.
Her 1944 self-portrait The Broken Column shows Kahlo on the brink of collapsing from physical and emotional pain, her upper body supported by a body brace or some sort of medical corsetry, and her spine replaced by a metal column. “A lot of male painters were painting women in a very beautiful and elegant way then,” says Ochoa. “She didn’t do that. She just painted women as they were, and that makes her a feminist.”
Above ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of Dutch National Opera & Ballet)
‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of Dutch National Opera & Ballet)
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Ochoa wants to emphasise in Frida that it was art that gave Kahlo the strength to keep going despite her poor health and failed relationships. “But it’s impossible to show her strength [through choreography]. It’s the situation that will show [the dynamic in her relationships],” she says. “How she interacted with Rivera was definitely no romantic duet. He was 40 and she was 20 when they got married. He was a large man. Her mother said it was a wedding between an elephant and a dove. So my Kahlo character has to be like a little bird around him, and he has to be tall, big and grounded. My poor dancer [playing Rivera], who will be wearing a fat suit, won’t be showing off his beautiful technique.”
Kahlo’s creative process was greatly informed by Mexican folk art. Ochoa says her characters and subjects are “like hieroglyphs and very two-dimensional. In her time, it was called Naïve art [by her contemporaries], which was very condescending. But she fought against these comments and said, ‘Don’t call me naive. I can paint like the Spaniards or other Europeans, but I decided to paint in a Mexican way so that you know something about my ancestors, my country and my culture.’”
Above The bird character in ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of Dutch National Opera & Ballet)
The bird character in ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of Dutch National Opera & Ballet)
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To honour this style, Ochoa choreographed movements that mimic Kahlo’s Mexican folk art characters, which are more angular and flatter compared to classical ballet movements, and included skeleton puppets onstage, a reference to the skeleton motif in many of the artist’s paintings.
The choreographer says Kahlo “inspired me as an artist to be more personal about my work and to be unashamed about putting my emotions out there”. Some of the female-centric topics in Frida, such as miscarriage, extramarital affairs and emotional suffering, subjects “we don’t talk about, we don’t show, because it’s not art. Well, Frida Kahlo made it art. It can be very confronting and uncomfortable. But at some point, the audience starts to understand [why I portray these moments onstage]. I had a lot of women crying in Phoenix. They said to me, ‘I’ve never seen somebody putting my story on stage.’”
Above Xuan Cheng as Frida in Hong Kong Ballet’s ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of SWKit and Hong Kong Ballet)
Xuan Cheng as Frida in Hong Kong Ballet’s ‘Frida’ (Photo: courtesy of SWKit and Hong Kong Ballet)
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Ochoa has made a name for herself as the creator of ballets celebrating period-defining female characters: they include Argentinian politician and activist Evita Perón in Doña Perón (2022); opera singer Maria Callas in Callas: La Divina (2023); and the titular French designer in Coco Chanel: The Life of a Fashion Icon (2023), which she premiered with the Hong Kong Ballet. In April, she will premiere a new production of Carmen with the Miami City Ballet, a 21st-century reimagining of Bizet’s iconic, doomed character. With each of her works, she hopes to make female characters more human and realistic.
“When my characters are not so black-and-white and full of flaws; when they’re neither the winners nor losers but all of it, they’re so much more interesting and real to me,” she says. “I like that I bring them to life and offer them to ballerinas who are otherwise always doing the young princesses or Juliet from the same repertoire. I want to give them a different kind of woman to express [through ballet] so that we, as women, can relate more to these stories.”
Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
