Carmen y Frida!
In the San Francisco Ballet’s Dos Mujeres, two powerful and passionate Latin women take center stage.
Sasha De Sola and Jennifer Stahl in Arielle Smith's Carmen // © Reneff-Olson Productions
All hail powerful Latin women! That could have been a banner draped over the War Memorial Opera House for the San Francisco Ballet’s staging of “Dos Mujeres,” the company’s first double bill to feature two Latina choreographers. The first ballet, the world premiere of Arielle Smith’s Carmen, is a sizzling, feminist, poly-sexual reimagining of Bizet’s opera. The second, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Broken Wings, is a poetic, visually-rich retelling of the life of the great Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.
Each work had its own, very different, strengths. Carmen’s sinuous eroticism was enriched by a first-rate score by jazz pianist and composer Arturo O’Farrill, while Broken Wings featured some exceptionally creative choreography and staging. Neither show had any show-stopping dance moments, as there were in the company’s wonderful production of George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but both the principal and the ensemble dancing in both was excellent (which with the SF Ballet is pretty much a given).
Carmen was less ambitious—Smith basically just took the leash off Bizet’s archetypal seductress, letting her feast at carnal will and live steamily ever after instead of being killed by a jealous lover —but to me, more successful in its limited aim. There was nothing particularly profound about the story, but that didn’t matter. It vindicated the old adage that a large part of the aesthetic appeal of dance is simply that it presents beautiful human bodies in exquisite, and in this case highly erotic, motion.
By contrast, Broken Wings hit both higher and lower notes. It had some absolutely breath-taking moments, and Ochoa made some brilliant creative choices, but she also made some questionable ones. It was a solid piece, a respectful and heartfelt tribute to a remarkable woman and a great artist, but it missed opportunities to go into deeper and edgier artistic and biographical territory. In the end, it felt a little tame. And Frida Kahlo was the opposite of tame.
Isabella DeVivo and Jihyun Choi in Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's Broken Wings // © Reneff-Olson Productions
The ballet opens with one of Ochoa’s most effective pieces of metaphoric staging: Kahlo dancing with three skeletal embodiments of death. This theme runs through the entire piece, and it works on many different levels: It’s a constant reminder not just of Kahlo’s ongoing existential struggle to find redemption and meaning and pleasure in her short, pain-filled life, but of the Mexican cultural traditions, including the Dia de los Muertos, that were so important to her. Ochoa also handles Kahlo’s horrible bus accident and its aftermath beautifully. The choreography and dancing as the terribly injured Kahlo tries to take the simplest steps, her legs buckling under her unnaturally, was exquisite and moving. (Kahlo is danced by Isabelle DeVivo and Nikisha Fogo; I saw Fogo, who was excellent.) But the aesthetic highlight of the piece, for me, was when a radiant reindeer-woman (Jihyun Choi), a figure that appears in Kahlo’s searing autobiographical painting The Wounded Deer, appeared and stretched out her hand to the injured painter. The reindeer woman is described as Kahlo’s sister Cristina, to whom Kahlo was very close (and who caused Kahlo great anguish when she had an affair with Diego Rivera), but to me it was more powerful to read her as representing Kahlo’s art. It was a piercing and transcendent moment, one that connected Kahlo’s life with her nascent art in a marvelously embodied way.
But after these superb moments, Broken Wings seemed to lose its creative spark. There’s a group of all-male Kahlo avatars in dresses: perhaps this gender-bending casting was intended to illuminate Kahlo’s bisexuality and what could be seen as her male energy, but I found it more cryptic than enlightening. Kahlo’s all-important, obsessive, alternately lacerating and loving relationship with the great muralist, obsessive philanderer and egotistical man-baby Diego Rivera is reduced to a garden-variety jealous-love relationship. And as Ochoa’s Kahlo nears the end of her life, she starts smiling a lot, which seemed jarringly sentimental and off. Kahlo did find a measure of peace in her life, but she was a far more jagged a character than the one presented here. It’s odd, for example, that Ochoa barely alludes to Kahlo’s own insatiable sexual appetites, which extended to both men and women and were a central part of the uniquely intense, almost sado-masochistic dynamic she had with Rivera.
At the end of the opera, after Kahlo goes into a box representing death, there’s a lovely moment when a gorgeous figure suddenly appears atop the box, simultaneously a manifestation of Kahlo’s magnificent art and a symbol of art’s immortality. It was moving, but I couldn’t help wishing that Ochoa had deployed that figure, and others, when her Kahlo character was still alive. More reindeer-women! Last year’s SF Opera production of another work about the couple, El Ultimo Sueno de Frida y Diego, had its dramatic shortcomings, but its climax, when living tableaux of the couple’s paintings appear in picture frames, was glorious, a true coup de theatre. Broken Wings didn’t need to imitate that specific bit of stagecraft. But Ochoa is an innovative stager who had a golden opportunity to pay homage both to Kahlo’s work and to the tortured and triumphant life from which that life sprang, and it was a pity she didn’t take more advantage of it.
Nonetheless, Broken Wings, like Carmen, is well worth seeing. Broken Wings does not capture full-spectrum Frida Kahlo, that brilliant, obsessive, self-destructive, self-willed, devoted, unfaithful, indomitable hurricane of a woman. But it captures some of her innumerable facets. And the moments when Kahlo fights with and overcomes her own shattered body, and is visited by a muse with the head of an animal that moves on angels’ feet, shine like unforgettable diamonds.