Electrifying and strange

‘Where was the Kahlo brow?’ asked my guest in the first interval of English National Ballet’s She Persisted, a triple bill celebrating female choreographers. She was right: Frida had been plucked. It was an odd decision for a production that does not otherwise shy from ugliness. Broken Wings, a ballet inspired by the life of Frida Kahlo by Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, was first performed in 2016 and is revived here in a carnival of Tehuana skirts, antler bonnets and capering day-of-the-dead skeletons. The surrealist André Breton likened Kahlo’s art to ‘a ribbon around a bomb’ and that is Katja Khaniukova’s Kahlo: silken and explosive.

We see her first as a teenager, all possibility, lifts and lightness. After the trolleybus accident that breaks Kahlo’s spine, Khaniukova is transformed. She is manhandled, stripped, bent and pinioned by four sinister skeletons. She shows us Kahlo’s pain and panic through arrested movement, spasms and a silent agonised scream.