With new Joffrey show, Chicago is reaching peak Frida Kahlo

What is it about Frida Kahlo that resonates so strongly with people?

Here in Chicago, we are at a peak-Frida moment. The Joffrey Ballet’s presentation of “Broken Wings,” opening Thursday and running through Sunday at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park, will deliver a portrayal of the famed artist in dance, by choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa.

That follows a series of recent cultural events with Frida as the star. Just this year, Writers Theatre presented the one-woman show “Frida . . . A Self-Portrait,” and The Art Institute of Chicago mounted an exhibit focusing on the artist’s friendship, and time in Paris, with the influential ex-pat Mary Reynolds. This coming spring, Lyric Opera of Chicago will give the local premiere of the opera “El último sueño de Frida y Diego.”

Starkly, the Kahlo cluster comes at a turbulent time for Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Chicago, with immigration enforcement targeting Latino communities. The celebration of a Mexican icon in defiance of political conditions wasn’t planned — the politics often moves faster than culture scheduling — but the art speaks to the moment anyway.

“I think it’s the spirit of Frida that she planted it there,” says Lopez Ochoa.

At a recent rehearsal preparing “Broken Wings,” which will appear as half a double bill, the dancers depicted abstracted episodes from Kahlo’s biography. Kahlo duets with Diego Rivera, the muralist with whom she shared a tumultuous marriage. A coterie of skeletons dramatize her accident with a trolley, the effects of which would dog her for the remainder of her too-short life. She interacts, in a sort of reverie, with a deer that is also her. After an incongruously chirpy, “All right, miscarriage!” from the rehearsal director, the dancers dramatize her loss of a pregnancy.

Kahlo, who died in 1954 at age 47, is best known for her painted self-portraits, adding fantastical elements to her already-distinctive appearance, featuring her trademark unibrow. In her art, she alludes to her dramatic life, freighted with health struggles and her fraught marriage. Those biographical threads weave into the iconography of her paintings, making her art and her life feel like one and the same.

Lopez Ochoa originally created “Broken Wings” for the English National Ballet in 2016, then extended it into a full-length ballet titled “Frida” in 2020. She says that in the next two years, 12 companies will perform one version or the other.

“Everybody wants a piece of Frida,” she says. “They’re inspired by her story, not just the ballet.”

Lopez Ochoa thinks Kahlo’s strong sense of self connects her with people. “She was a feminist avant la lettre,” she says. “A feminist in that she really lived and created work unapologetically and as authentically as she could be.”

Kahlo did not shy away from addressing her injuries in her art. For Lopez Ochoa, the chief choreographic challenge in creating the dance was how to portray Kahlo’s injury and disability in a form practiced by artists capable of the top-flight physicality of ballet. She elegantly solved the problem by incorporating fantastical episodes, analogous to the quasi-surrealist imagery from her paintings.

“It’s like you go into dreams, like in our dreams we can do everything,” she says. “There’s no gravity. And that is what dancers are after, defying gravity.”

Dylan Gutierrez, who dances the role of Diego Rivera, says Kahlo’s appeal lies in her blending of her biography into her art.

“I think all of Frida’s life is art,” he says. “She harnessed it and used it — even her pains and her accidents, and her leg that was destroyed. That’s why she is so iconic, because actually her art is a confession.”

In her art, Kahlo created a dichotomy between the individual — these are particular things that happened to a real person — and the mythic, casting herself in a story like a saint.

Caitlin Haskell, the lead curator on the “Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds” exhibit at the Art Institute, points to two Kahlo paintings to illustrate the point: “The Frame,” in which her image is surrounded by birds and flowers, and “La Venadita,” where Kahlo’s face appears on a deer.

“Both of those are full of religious iconography, classic tropes of devotional art, of depictions of martyrs,” Haskell says. “She is showing herself in a moment of vulnerability, as well as claiming her place in the field of 20th century art.”

Discussions of 20th century art can feel a long way away from masked immigration agents in the streets, but Kahlo is so embedded in Mexican culture that protestors can use her image on signs to evoke the whole country.

Gutierrez, who has Mexican heritage, says the moment heightens the experience of portraying Rivera. “It definitely fills me with a great sense of pride,” he says. “There’s also a conflicting feeling of privilege, where other people are suffering, but I’m in this dream world where I get to do this very pretty thing. But there is a feeling of responsibility, because with entertainment, you can educate people.”

Ultimately, all this Kahlo isn’t thumbing its nose at anti-immigrant attitudes — it’s saying that regardless of the current turmoil, Latino culture was here in the past, is here now and will be in the future.