REVIEW: English National Ballet – Broken Wings -Streaming – Scene Magazine

Tamara Rojo, artistic director of the English National Ballet has decided to feature herself in this 45 minute streaming ballet about the troubled life of artist Frida Kahlo and her tempestuous love life with poet Diego Rivera.

Knowing very little of the story of her life I was looking for a narrative which really only partially exists. This is more an expressive, emotive piece than a straight shot at biography.

Tamara is both feisty and fragile, a slight figure against the padded-out paunchiness of Irek Mukhamelov as Diego. Ever-present are the six skeleton figures who at one point don sombreros and become a comic if grisly Mariachi band.

The bright extravagance of Frida’s paintings is portrayed in the highly colourful costumes of the corps de ballet – portraying birds, flowers and even a wounded stag. Frida indeed becomes part of a gigantic butterfly painting in her dying moments.

Peter Salem’s music is evocative of Central America but also strident and dissonant at times, and is a perfect accompaniment to the angular , almost mechanical movements of the corps.

The Day of the Dead is captured simply but dramatically and as the skeletons remind us even in birth there is an echo of mortality.