‘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. She is now rigid, limp as a ragdoll. We see her fearful reckoning with her own reflection and her fractured, twitching bones. Irek Mukhamedov as Diego Rivera is deliberately boorish and graceless, though he overplays his hand: too doddering, too much the buffoon. In the pas de deux, they are like Venus and Vulcan. We need some charisma to believe that defiant, wracked Kahlo would love him.
In her dreams, Kahlo dances. She watches a weird parade of men in flounces who dance with a strength and power denied to her. In these flamboyant, unsettling scenes, colour is more disturbing than darkness. The four skeletons in sombreros haunt and taunt her, funny and frightening in equal parts. Their ladder dance is a delicious riff on Swan Lake’s Dance of the Cygnets. Fittingly strange and surreal.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in