Review of the
Production “Frida Kahlo in Love”
Directed by
Professor Kelly S. Taylor
Michael S.
Bowman, Associate Professor
Department of
Communication Studies
On Friday, March 30, 2007, I
attended a performance of “Frida Kahlo in Love.” Conceived and directed by Professor Kelly
Taylor, the production took place in the Marriott Hotel in
In offering this more formal written
review of Professor Taylor’s work on “Frida Kahlo in Love,” I want to praise
three things. First, I thought the
production succeeded as an act of creative research. Second, I found it to succeed as an act of
teaching. Third, it succeeded for me as
a work of art.
Creative
Research
As creative research, the production
of “Frida” seeks an investigative method, a material form, and a mode of
publication that provide alternatives to the traditional scholarly essay. The exploration of such research has become
an important theme in contemporary communication theory and discussions of
performance studies pedagogy.
Performance theorist Judith Hamera writes:
to embrace performance is to see
scholarship itself as poiesis, as a creative thing, a relational, aesthetic,
political and affective labor and not
simply a cognitive one.
Experience
is not scholarship. Joan Scott [in the
1991 essay "The Evidence of Experience"] tells us this. Performance links experience, theory, and the
work of close critique in ways that make precise analytical claims about
cultural production and consumption, and expose how both culture and our claims
are themselves constructed things, products of hearts and souls, minds and
hands. (Opening Acts, 241)
Performance-based
research poses different kinds of questions about subjects of investigation,
familiar and not-so-familiar. While
Professor Taylor engages in conventional scholarly publication, she, like other
performance studies scholars, views the development of original performances
like “Frida” as a different form of scholarship. I almost said "complementary form,"
but this is not what I mean: performance is not to be viewed as a supportive or
supplementary method of asking scholarly questions, a kind of handmaiden to
conventional research, but a different
method, productive of different kinds of knowledge.
Professor Taylor's long-standing desire to make a stage
performance in response to the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo presented her
with a range of options. She could adapt
an existing biographical narrative, or group of these, into a new script; the
result might resemble a conventional dramatization of a biography or novel,
something akin to a stage version of the 2002 biopic, Frida, that starred Salma Hayek in the title role. Or she might have developed a documentary or
lecture-recital style Readers Theatre production, in which primary and
secondary materials related to Kahlo’s life and works could be presented. But
Professor Taylor was interested in approaching Kahlo's life and works more
freshly and abstractly, through a blend of techniques that drew on her strengths
as an adapter and director of literary texts, image-based movement work, and
literary principles of intertextuality and ekphrasis that she has become
acquainted with through the years.
In her research, Taylor discovered that because many of Kahlo’s paintings
are self-portraits art critics and historians tend to read them as a kind of
visual autobiography, documenting, albeit in somewhat abstract and surreal
terms, the artist’s struggles with the traumas and pains she suffered during
her life (illnesses, accidents, her stormy marriage(s) to the artist Diego
Rivera, and so forth). Without denying
the validity of such readings, Taylor noted that other famous male artists
known for self-portraiture (e.g., Rembrandt) were often interpreted
differently, that their self-portraits somehow addressed wider human
experiences, while Kahlo’s were seen as being merely personal documents. It was her aim, therefore, to develop a
performance piece that could give weight both to the autobiographical element
in Kahlo’s paintings and to aspects of them that
The goal of the “Frida” production, in short, was not to reproduce
or unpack hermeneutically any existing narration of the artist’s life and work.
Instead, the director and cast members
devised new compositions in a fashion analogous to ekphrasis in literary
composition, a phenomenon in which a work of visual art such as a painting or
sculpture inspires the creation of a work of verbal art such as a poem. As
Teaching
In speaking with the cast and director following the performance,
I became aware of the complex process of teaching involved in the development
and rehearsal of the performance.
Professor Taylor began by bringing her cast inside her own
understanding of selected paintings and texts by Kahlo. She then invited them to work with the texts
and images to find their own resonances, to create their own ekphrastic links,
through the adaptation of the texts into different voices and through still and
moving images they would create with their bodies, costumes, masks, dances, and
other choreographed pantomime segments.
Another important aspect of the process and the resulting performance
was the replication by Taylor and her cast of several of Kahlo’s paintings. This led the students into an intensive study
of the artist’s imagery, of recurring themes and patterns in her work, her use
of color, and so forth. As a result of
studying Kahlo’s own compositional methods, both in writing and painting, the
resulting production seemed to translate not merely the “passion” from one
medium to another, but the very techniques or methods of the subject (Kahlo, in
this case) from one medium to another.
The result was a production that conveyed the passions of both the
performing artists and Kahlo, a production that was very much invested with the
personalities and insights of the director and cast while also being
“Kahlo-esque.” By all accounts, the
teaching activity was central to the development of “Frida Kahlo in Love” and
what made it such an engaging experience for the students, although its
artistic power cannot be explained solely by reference to this.
Artistic Merit
In describing what affected me about the production, I find it
useful to highlight two aspects in particular: its success in meeting its own
aesthetic aims, and its challenge to my conventional expectations for
performances of this type.
With regard to the first aspect, the production succeeded in
creating a number of bold, striking visual and acoustic images with the actors’
bodies and voices, images that created associative links between Kahlo’s texts
and her paintings that helped foreground aspects of the artist’s work that I
had not noticed simply from viewing the images myself or reading the texts on
the page. This kind of interpretive work
is of course a hallmark of many performance studies productions, and in the
hands of a skilled director and a smart cast, such as we had in this
production, the effect is similar to reading or listening to a good critic talk
about an artwork or a piece of literature.
Moreover, because the production successfully retained the more open,
ambiguous, and even surrealistic style of its subject, the production also gave
audience members an opportunity to forge their own interpretive links with the
production and with Kahlo’s work, thus opening it up to a much broader realm of
experience than that of the artist’s biography.
The densely-layered composition that resulted was relatively brief in
duration—the performance lasted a mere 20-25 minutes—but it had the richness of
imagery and connotative power of a poem.
The second aspect of the production that I found compelling was
the way in which it reimagined the possibilities of performances of ekphrastic
work. I have seen a number of such
productions, in galleries and in theatres, and nearly all of them rely on a
fairly standard set of moves: a large projected image of the original painting
appears in the background, and a performer stands next to that projected image
and performs the ekphrastic text that was composed in response to the
painting. In all these cases, I have
found that the effect is one of anchoring the meaning of the image, almost in
the manner of a caption, which tends to undermine the aesthetic identity of the
poem. Professor Taylor and most of the
audience who saw the production with me are as familiar with this style of
performance as I am, and to her credit, she upset my expectations for the
performance I was about to see. By
selecting texts and images for the show that were not, in fact, ekphrastic, and
by inviting the audience to view the production instead as itself ekphrastic in
nature, Taylor presented those of us in performance studies with new
possibilities for imagining what had become a somewhat tired and clichéd style
of performance.
In sum, I was quite impressed by the work of Dr. Taylor and her
student ensemble on this production. I
hope that they will have an opportunity to present this performance piece to
other audiences in the future, and to present it in an environment more
conducive to the work than a small convention meeting room in a Marriott hotel.