Greenwich + Docklands International Festival brings spirit of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo to Woolwich

The spirit of Frida Kahlo descends on the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival this summer in a colourful show featuring airborne Mexican ‘bird women’, film and fireworks, says Fiona Hughes
Full flight: the 20m pole from which the voladoras launch themselves is reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s injured spine as she imagined it in her painting, The Broken Column (1944)
Fiona Hughes14 May 2015

One of the many unexpected sights in Mexico City — at a ramshackle street vendor’s stall, draped across an array of politically serious-looking newspapers — is a washing line of photos for sale of Frida Kahlo, held up by clothes pegs.

In her home country, the artist, who died in 1954, has pop-star status — and has all the T-shirts, mugs, clip-on plaits and other merchandise to prove it.

She is a fully fledged national hero, whose brightly coloured paintings, with their surrealist sensibility and emotional themes, seem to embody all that is Mexican.

While her recognition factor might not be quite so high in Woolwich, Londoners are likely to be just as uplifted when Kahlo’s spirit descends in the form of a large-scale, multimedia theatrical spectacle called The Four Fridas, over four nights this July.

The 45-minute open-air show, which will play to crowds of up to 3,000 for each performance, is inspired by the artist’s work and life. It will draw particularly on her dedication to pre-Hispanic tribes, cultures and their costumes that she loved to wear.

Going the distance: these Voladoras from Mexico will travel to Europe for the first time to appear as part of The Four Fridays (Picture: Seoirse O'Mahony)

The Four Fridas is the centrepiece of this year’s Greenwich + Docklands International Festival. Artistic director Bradley Hemmings has brought together 36 outdoor theatre companies over 10 days, from home and abroad, including dancers, acrobats, aerialists, pyrotechnicians and jugglers, to put on the mostly free shows in the public spaces of the borough of Greenwich and, across the river, around Canary Wharf and nearby parts of east London. If previous years are anything to go by, it will be a joyous affair that brings a carnival atmosphere.

For The Four Fridas, which Hemmings himself has conceived, he has marshalled impressive support. He has form when it comes to the outdoor extravaganza, having directed the opening ceremony of the Paralympics. That is why he chose to work again with Jenny Sealey, his co-director in 2012 and head of disabled theatre group Graeae. He has also commissioned Shechter Junior, the emerging-talent wing of the consistently cool Hofesh Shechter dance company, for one of the four segments of the show.

Novelist Jay Griffiths has written a script, in the shape of a long prose poem to be delivered in a voiceover from Kahlo’s point of view. Holding everything together, says Hemmings, will be performer Welly O’Brien, from disabled dance company Candoco, “channelling Frida throughout”.

Disability was a fact of Kahlo’s life. Her leg was withered by childhood polio and her spine severely injured in a bus crash at the age of 18 that led to more than 30 operations, periods of constant pain and eventually the amputation of one leg at the knee.

She was often bedridden and was unable to have children. Her self-portraits, in a harsh surgical corset or lying on a bloodied bed, are testament to these experiences.

Kahlo incorporated her suffering into her art but she also rose above it, which — along with her respect for the natural world, socialist views in an unequal society and unswerving pride in her country — is probably what makes her so beloved in Mexico. She was the life and soul of gatherings, despite her pain, encouraging those around her to celebrate, sing, dance, drink and, above all, to aspire to overcome.

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It’s that zest for life that The Four Fridas aims to convey. Perhaps Hemmings’s boldest decision has been to invite a group of voladoras (female “flyers”) from Puebla, a mountainous region outside Mexico City, to perform a shocking but exhilarating pre-Hispanic ritual ceremony that lives on in modern Mexico, which he has woven into the show.

In a 21st-century twist, and in honour of Kahlo, the director has found a group of indigenous Nahua women who perform the ritual that is more usually the preserve of men. I went to watch them act out the heart-stopping feat in their village of Xochiapulco. First sight was of four women, in cheerful, silky costumes dripping with ribbon, solemnly marching to the beat of a drum towards an 18-metre tall pole.

The slender, bare tree trunk had been selected by their leader (the one male, the caporal), and, in an earlier ceremony, cut down, carried to the chosen spot and fixed into the ground.

The whole event is a communion with the deities and spirits of the elements. It is a ritual to give thanks to a fertile Earth and to ask for it to be bountiful again, though in each region different meanings and variations have evolved over generations.

In Xochiapulco, the four women eventually climbed the pole, whose rudimentary rungs fixed at intervals make it, to Hemmings’s mind, look like a spine and connect it to Kahlo. With ropes tied to their waists and wound around the top of the pole, each of the voladoras took up position on a square wooden open frame fitted over the top of the pole.

Heart-stopping: the ritual "flight"

Meanwhile, on a treacherously small, circular platform — at 30cm in diameter, the size of a large cake tin — at the centre of the frame, the seated caporal invoked the spirits with a flute before — terrifyingly — standing up to do a vigorous stomping dance on his tiny stage. After a while, he addressed the women in turn and they each calmly rolled backwards off the frame, in a flutter of billowing material, as their ropes slowly unfurled, floating them upside-down to the ground in three graceful minutes.

The danger of the ritual “flight”, as they call it, is clear — there have been a couple of deadly falls in other groups in recent years — which makes it all the more moving, as well as beautiful, to witness. By the end of this summer this strange ceremony will be more familiar, since another team of Mexican “birdmen” (all male, this time) are also visiting to perform at the Origins festival (London location not yet announced) and at Glastonbury. The sudden interest is probably a result of voladoras recently achieving UNESCO recognition as Intangible Cultural Heritage, and therefore wider notice.

The voladoras women, who showed us the pristine passports they had to get for the first time in preparation for their trip, will, in The Four Fridas, take flight from a 20m fixed pole. Their action can be seen as a leap of faith and great optimism, which chimes with Kahlo’s sense that, even at her most immobile, her imagination could still take flight, soaring away from her sickbed to liberate her.

Interestingly, when asked, through a translator, the women didn’t talk about the fear they might have felt, or even courage, but the freedom.

As the show, with a specially commissioned soundtrack, also relies on film projection, lighting effects and — for the grand finale — fireworks, it has to be performed against a dark sky and will not begin until 10pm. Before that, the Royal Artillery Parade Ground in Woolwich, where it is taking place, will be bustling with food stalls and music to set a festive scene. The hope is that the sweeping performance will have an immersive feel: there will be some reserved seats up on stands but the majority, for promenaders, will be free. The venue, next to Woolwich Common, is an important aspect of this approximately £500,000 venture, in a part of London that is in desperate need of improvement. It’s one of the first signs of a commitment that Greenwich borough promises to be significant to culturally led regeneration for the area, which will benefit from the new Crossrail link in the not-too-distant future.

The Four Fridas should be a visual feast. Featured will be a version of the painted boats that ply the canals in Mexico City, which will do double duty as Kahlo’s decorated four-poster bed, and the mysterious pre-Hispanic pyramids of Teotihuacan also have a role. Spectators aren’t likely to get all the references, but Frida Kahlo’s history of childhood trauma, how you learn from it and move on with life, is a story that everyone can understand.

Seated tickets for The Four Fridas, July 1-4, are on sale from May 14 at festival.org, which also includes full programme details for Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, June 26 - July 5. Fiona Hughes flew to Mexico City with Aeromexico.

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