There is no denying the enduring legacy of Frida Kahlo. Her talent, trauma and charisma made her one of the most compelling artists to rise out of Modernism.
However, it was only decades after her death that historians began to examine her life and work. This belated recognition has seen Kahlo rise to the main stage of art and popular culture – her works are highly coveted and her image has spread like wildfire. Nevertheless, beyond all the ‘Mexi-kitsch’ and Kahlo clichés you might see stamped on the walls of inner city cafés, there are parts of her identity that remain in the dark.
It is the lesser-known aspects of her life that form the basis of Falling In Love With Frida, a theatrical piece conceived by performance artist and choreographer Caroline Bowditch. As part of Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, two performances will be staged at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatres next month.
“I think my interest in Frida piqued at the fact that she is one of the highest-fetching female artists in the world but very few people know that she lived with a disability for most of her life,” says Bowditch. “As a disabled performer, I became interested in the question of how to make art that is just remembered for the art and not the circumstances of who created it.”
Falling In Love With Frida premiered in 2014 and won the Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Since then, Bowditch and her all-female cast have been touring for 18 months and have performed the piece more than 80 times. “The structure is still the same but we are so much more embedded in it,” she says. “Little things are always being developed and we’re always refining it.”
Although Kahlo is at the heart of the show, Falling In Love With Frida is a unique blend of two life stories. “It started as a love letter from me to Frida,” says Bowditch. “And then we started to add things that I’d written as part of the research and personal reflections on my life, so bits of me were gradually woven into it. Now it is this completely entwined story of Frida and me.”
The collaborative process of constructing the piece involved drawing material from a range of different sources. “The performers and I worked with images Frida had painted as well as text I had generated,” says Bowditch. “We used lots of things featured in Frida’s work – for instance, there is a section involving ribbons. We also have a whole gestural sequence based on the way Frida positions herself in photographs.”
A significant part of the mainstream Frida narrative is her passionate and turbulent relationship with fellow artist Diego Rivera. Contrary to this, Bowditch’s project aims to erode the heteronormative view of the artist and examine her bisexuality and relationships with women. “I don’t talk about Diego at all,” she says. “Some of [the performance] is about sexuality and my own sexual journey. I think there is a need for us, as a society, to talk more about sexuality and disability because I don’t think we talk about those things enough.”
One of the central themes driving the performance is the question of legacy. This concern partially came about as the product of an out-of-the-blue email Bowditch received. “A woman who knew me when I was a child saw me on television and wrote to me. She said, ‘I met you when you were six and I’m really fascinated to see where you’ve got to as a person.’ So I started thinking about legacy and the marks you leave on people’s lives completely unknowingly. We are so unaware of what we leave behind us, whether that’s positive or negative.”
The notion of legacy resonates strongly in Frida Kahlo’s art. In particular, the way she would craft her appearance presents a striking contrast to the ubiquitous nature of images in the digital age. “Frida was such an image creator,” says Bowditch. “And if there was a photo of her she didn’t like, she would just cut her head out. She left what she wanted people to see and none of what she didn’t. I think a lot of us do not have that kind of control now, especially with things like Instagram. Of course, on the other hand, Kahlo could be thought of as the original selfie queen – she was completely obsessed with painting self-portraits.”
The performances at Parramatta will include a Q&A session with the cast. “As an artist in receipt of public money, I think it is my responsibility as well as my passion to work out what people got from the show and what made them come in the first place,” says Bowditch. “What I find is that people often comment on what it means to see four strong women performing onstage together without any apology.”
In many ways, Kahlo is the ultimate minority figure – she was endearingly resilient in the face of hardship and fiercely individual. Bowditch’s version of the Kahlo story, however, remains distinct. “There is no shortage of performances about Frida Kahlo, but she has never been told from the perspective of disability,” Bowditch says. “Ultimately, the show is all about love, my love for Frida. It’s more about love than pain, although sometimes you can’t have love without pain.”
[Falling In Love With Frida photo by Anthony Hopwood]
Falling In Love With Frida runsFriday March 4 and Saturday March 5atRiverside Theatres.
