Frida Kahlo was an artist whose work was very personal.  This is not a profound observation, considering the fact that the image that appears most frequently in Kahlo’s work was her own face.  I point this fact out because when people, including art critics and historians talk about Kahlo’s work, few escape the almost overwhelming urge to look at her paintings as visual biography.  I am not suggesting that they are not.  However, when critics and observers talk about the work of the “great” male artists, like da Vinci and Rembrandt, they move beyond the personal significance of the images to discuss the how “important” works of art metaphorically comment on the human experience as well.

The images in Kahlo’s paintings are colorful, dramatic, and full of unexpected detail.  The same can be said of her life.  Her artwork commented, sometimes very explicitly, on her own experience.  However, her images also embody thoughts, ideas, and feelings shared by many other people living in very different circumstances.  People have continued to find relevance in her art long after her life was over.

Since viewing an exhibit of her paintings in 1993, I have been toying with ideas for a performance piece about Kahlo’s images that would do the artistic equivalent of letting me have my cake and eat it too.  That is to say, I wanted to come up with a performance that could give due weight to the personal significance of Kahlo’s art while simultaneously pointing towards the more generalizeable significance of her work.

Readers Theatre seemed to me to be an obvious choice for performance style for this project primarily because of the accepted convention of splitting the narrative voice among multiple readers, thus embodying the inherent herteroglossic qualities of a text (or in this case, of images).  In this production, therefore, Kahlo’s words are spoken by four women and one man.

When choosing the text, rather than going with a straightforward, linear narrative about Kahlo’s life, I was inspired by the literary phenomenon known as ekphrasis.  Ekphrasis occurs when a visual stimulus (usually a painting) prompts the creation of a literary work (usually a poem).  Ekphrastic work attempts to capture the passion from one type of media and translate it into another.  For my script, I chose a collection of poems and letters by Kahlo.  The texts are not necessarily ekphrastic.  The performance itself is intended to create the ekphrastic link between image and word.  This non-linear collection of texts is meant to tell the story not of Kahlo’s life, but of her loves, both the passions unique to her experience and those she shares with many women and men.

Performance of the poems and letters is linked by a series of mime pieces that I intend to echo Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations.  Performance inherently de-contextualizes  and re-contextualizes lived experience.  I have therefore framed this performance as a Dia de Los Muertos festival to foreground the fact that it is art not archeology; it is memory not story.

My directing style for this project was collaborative.  In an effort to lend the same sort of heteroglossic attitude to the staging of this piece that bifurcation gives to the representation of voice, I am using blocking that was generated by cast members and only “edited” by myself.  The performance you will see is a culmination not only of my vision of Frida Kahlo and her works, but one that I have crafted with the talented director/performers that have lent their talents to the creation and performance of this piece of spoken art.