REVIEW: The Four Fridas, Royal Artillery Barracks ✭✭✭

The Four Fridas. Photo: Alastair Muir The Four Fridas

Royal Artillery Barracks, Woolwich

02/07/15

3 Stars

The parade ground that runs along the wonderful Georgian facade of the former headquarters of the Royal Artillery is a fine and natural setting for an open-air spectacular, and the Greenwich and Docklands Festival are to be congratulated for bringing events such as The Four Fridas here. It is a natural location for large-scale shows and its flexible community-focused use now that the Artillery have moved out is all the more heartening when you think that this venue is most recently associated with the recent terrible murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in a street nearby. Memories still linger of the impressive Opening Ceremonies to the Olympic and Paralympic Games held in London in 2012, and The Four Fridas is best viewed as a (partly) successful coda to those spectacles. Bradley Hemmings, the director here, who was also responsible for the scene-setter to the Paralympics, writes in the brochure that Frida Kahlo was one of the representative images of the disabled he originally considered for that event; and now he has returned to her life as the basis of a meditation on the relationship between creativity and the overcoming of disability and persecution.

Frida Kahlo has received a huge amount of attention in recent years and it is tempting to say that she needs no introduction any longer. By any standards hers is a remarkable story of physical and personal adversity overcome and transmuted into an instantly recognizable artistic expression. Her story has made her a heroine for feminists and for champions of the creativity of the disabled, and rightly so. But the relentless determination to interpret the work through the life imposes limitations of understanding as well that need to be considered. She also belongs to the history of the reception and revival of Mexican indigenous culture, to the history of Surrealism, and also to the deployment of the visual arts in support of labour rights, as pioneered by her husband Diego Rivera. A fuller understanding of her significance requires breaking down the sense of hieratic isolation her own writings encouraged and promoted, and seeing her as a social being before she became an icon. For all its aesthetic achievements and visionary moments this show tends to reinforce the older stereotypical view of Frida.

We are presented with three structures or stages with audience seating set in traverse. At one end is a stepped platform reminiscent of a Mayan ziggurat: the platform can also be elevated vertically to provide a screen for presentation of animations, and a climbing surface. A huge white dress, the size of a balloon billows to one side. At the other end of proceedings is a mangled heap of wrecked metal, which comes to symbolize the bus accident that caused both Kahlo’s disabilities and ultimately her death. In the middle is a twenty-metre high pole bearing a rope wound around a windlass. This comes into its own in the final and most thrilling section of the evening – the flight of the Voladoras.

The presentation is divided into four sections each named after one of the elements of Air, Earth, Fire and Water. In the first section focused on the white dress and punctuated by fireworks and dancing the theme of flight is introduced as is the motif of the butterfly, which recurs across all the sections to symbolize Kahlo’s desire to escape her physical limitations through creativity. In the second section, accompanied by powerful visual effects, Frida experiences her accident and laments her disability. At one point she is transported in an open vehicle like a painted statue in a religious procession, wearing white and with only one leg – this is only one of several moments where the creative team are successful in finding a visual correlate for Frida’s life that goes beyond and adds to her own self-portraits. In the third section, by some distance the most satisfying, text taken from her writings fuses with visual animation on the screen to bring to life her painterly process. The animations take motifs from her work and assemble and disassemble them. This is the only point in the evening when you get an insight into Kahlo’s artistic process.. the stripping bare of layers, the statuesque formal figures, with their biological core exposed, the sharp edges and apparently discordant colour combinations, the amoral raw power of nature. In the final episode Frida’s social credo is stated, and the butterfly motif flourishes with renewed vigour as a celebration of the principle of diversity. The scene and the evening culminates with the flight of the Voladoras.. flying Maypole women.. who embody Frida’s aspiration towards harmony between humanity and nature. Fireworks punctuate the finale….

There is no doubt this was a technically accomplished show, which brought together a strong creative team who demonstrated fine skills in dancing, singing, sound projection, animation, acrobatics and – yes – human flying. There was expressive contemporary dancing from Shechter Junior symbolizing the struggles of the poor, and strongly projected declamation from the various actors portraying Frida at different points in her life. However, to me there were only two points at which medium and message fully and genuinely fused. One I have referred to - when animation gave us a momentary insight into the complex elements that merged in Kahlo’s aesthetic process. The other, and it was well worth the wait, was the ‘flight’ of the indigenous Mexican women – the Voladoras - who plunged from the platform at the top of the pole before settling into hypnotic unfurling, descending revolutions as the ropes at the top unraveled and the platform spun round. All the while their captain played a mournful flute solo from the top of the pole, and one of the women beat a little drum as she span around. Originally this was a fertility ritual from which women were excluded, but some regions in Mexico now permit women to ‘fly’ too and share a sense of balance between mankind and the elements. This simple, but arresting image did serve to bring together, at least for me, Kahlo’s aspirations for escape from being earthbound, for the restoration of harmony between man and nature, and for the empowerment of women wherever feasible. The finale was therefore both spectacle and symbol operating together.

So, in sum, there was a lot of talent and resources on show, and many ideas fizzing about, some more focused and thought-through than others. At points whether by symbolic art or factual information we received a more nuanced reading of Frida than some of her supporters allow. But other issues eg her relationship and painterly debt to Rivera were not mentioned at all. It is a shame there was not a larger audience but the show lacked a clear connection to the locality, and the director should have realized that a spectacle that would have gained a full house at any Central London park or piazza venue, would struggle to find larger measures of support outside without a more definite anchor in the local history of Woolwich.