It came as a shocking realisation to Tamara Rojo that, during her long career as a ballerina, she’d never once performed in a work created by a woman. Even in the 21st century, most of the world’s ballet repertory is choreographed by men. Now that Rojo is artistic director of English National Ballet, she’s determined to change the landscape. Her latest commission, She Said, is a programme of new one-act ballets all choreographed by women.
The suppression of women’s voices throughout history was a theme uppermost in Rojo’s mind when she met to discuss the programme with her three contributing choreographers, Aszure Barton, Yabin Wang and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. The theme struck a special chord for Lopez Ochoa because for years she had been looking for an opportunity to make a ballet about Frida Kahlo, the extraordinary Mexican painter whose talent was only recognised internationally after her death.
“I was partly drawn to Frida by the Latin connection,” says Lopez Ochoa, who is part Colombian, part Belgian. “But she was an amazing woman. For a long time I’d been fascinated by these strange portraits that she painted of herself but I hadn’t really understood them. Then about 10 years ago I saw a movie about her life and it made me appreciate how she’d been able to transform her sorrows and her pain into art. It was inspiring: I wanted to be like Frida and use my own experience more directly in my work, and I wanted to be able to share her story with an audience.”
On paper, it’s a story that might seem better left to film. Kahlo’s embrace of Mexican culture, her involvement with revolutionary politics and her emotional and professional quarrels with her swaggeringly entitled husband, Diego Rivera, are complicated issues for a wordless art form such as dance to navigate. The fact that Kahlo was disabled, after sustaining injuries in a bus accident when she was 18, makes her an even more unlikely candidate for a ballet heroine.
Lopez Ochoa, however, was clear that she only wanted to tell the basic facts of Kahlo’s life before letting her choreography loose into a more abstract, surreal treatment. She also knew that she wanted the input of Nancy Meckler – formerly joint director of the theatre group Shared Experience – with whom she had previously, and very successfully, collaborated on a dance adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire.
When I talk to the two women at ENB’s base in west London, it’s clear how well they operate as a team. Meckler tends to measure her words, Lopez Ochoa to spill them out; often they complete each other’s sentences and there’s a lot of laughter in between. It was Ashley Page, then director of Scottish Ballet, who brought them together for the Streetcar project. “He’d always wanted to experiment with a theatre director leading the creation of a new ballet,” says Meckler. “Annabelle and I were really thrown together, but we discovered that we shared a very similar aesthetic, we both like to tell stories in an impressionistic rather than a naturalistic way.”
Reunited for the Kahlo ballet, entitled Broken Wings, the two women read widely around their subject, brainstormed ideas and constructed a meticulously detailed scenario from which composer Peter Salem could begin writing the score. It was a rigorous process: “With every element we made ourselves think: ‘Do we need this, what part does it actually play?’” says Meckler. “We knew that we needed to see Frida starting to paint, but we didn’t need to see her father actually give her a paintbrush. We needed to show the accident, but we didn’t need the bus.”
They also had to consider how they would deal with Kahlo’s physical restrictions. Lopez Ochoa had a clear visual idea of transforming Kahlo’s bed – where she spent months after the accident – into a cube in which the dance character could be enclosed yet free to move. For her, the essence of Kahlo’s character was the power and joy that the painter gained from transcending her life through her art.
Casting the ballet proved interesting. Lopez Ochoa had not expected that Rojo, as ENB’s director, would be available to perform, but during a discussion about who might play Frida she found herself saying: “I need a petite, Hispanic dancer and I keep looking at you, Tamara.” Rojo agreed instantly (it’s since proved disconcerting to them how much Rojo actually knows about Kahlo). And it was Rojo who also came up with the idea of casting Irek Mukhamedov, former star of the Bolshoi and the Royal Ballet, in the role of Rivera.
At 56, he’s perfect for Lopez Ochoa’s choreography – old enough to inspire her to a movement vocabulary appropriate to the ageing, bulky Rivera, but fit enough to hold his own with a stageful of younger dancers.
While the choreography is created in the studio, Meckler’s role is to provide an outside eye on the material and to work on character and motivation with members of the cast. Ever since her first experience of ballet dancers with Streetcar, she’s has nothing but respect for them. “Because of the way they work, some ballet dancers may not have been exposed to a lot of culture, but they have so much emotional depth, perhaps because so many of them have had quite a hard life. And their concentration! I can give an actor a note 10 times and they’ll still forget it. Dancers never forget a thing that you tell them.”
Both women have been impressed by the dancers’ “beautiful openness” of attitude, their keenness to experiment with a different style of movement, both in Broken Wings and in the two other works that complete the programme. They’re equally impressed by Rojo’s boldness in initiating the experiment of She Said. “She’s fearless,” says Lopez Ochoa, “and other companies are becoming very interested in what she’s doing. I’m proud of being part of this. I don’t really feel I have to make a political statement about my own career, I like the way it has gone. But I have seen so many opportunities go to men who are younger and less experienced than me. And I know a lot of women suffer from the feeling that they aren’t good enough. If I can open things up for younger female choreographers, if I can inspire a dancer to believe she can start choreographing, then I’m really glad to take on that role.”
• English National Ballet’s She Said is at Sadler’s Wells, London, 13-16 April. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
