Broken Wings

Tell us all about your designs for Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Broken Wings

Creating the designs started with a thorough research into Frida Kahlo’s work, her life and her artistic journey. Together with Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, director Nancy Meckler, composer Peter Salem and lighting designer Vinny Jones, we had a couple of intense meetings, discussing Frida as a character, deciding what parts of her work and life we found inspiring and wanted to include in the piece. What is Frida Kahlo all about, for us? That was the big question.

From that I started designing. The challenge for me was to capture the powerful energy of Frida Kahlo’s work without making exact copies of her paintings. Her work is so strong that I felt I had to find a translation of her personality and work for the designs. Trying to copy anything would never be as impressive as her own paintings.

I started using elements and colours of her work and mixing them with the story we wanted to tell, the life she led. The final result has become a mixture of iconic Frida Kahlo images, with a big Mexican influence, a hint of time period and a glance of what we think her dreams and imagination was all about.

We’ve seen design sketches featuring large headdresses, and even body painting. Where did those ideas come from?

Frida Kahlo used a lot of body paint in her work: in her self-portraits there are tears all over her body, or an eye, or even her husband Diego Rivera painting on her forehead. That was the original inspiration.

Then Annabelle showed the work of Ryan Burke, a photographer and make-up artist who uses very extreme and powerful make-up and headdresses in his work. That inspired me to take this body paint idea further.

What about the headdresses?

There are lots of different designs, based on Frida’s paintings. I've been lucky that Mark Wheeler has been asked to make the headdresses. He has a great creative mind and really knows how to translate my designs into real pieces of art that are still easy to wear and dance with.

The base for all the pieces are the wigs. I worked with Mark and Amelia Carrington from ENB's wig department to puzzle together all items together into one structure. Some headdresses are just the hair mixed with strips of fabric from the costumes, some have huge forms like antlers or sculls entwined in the hair, sculptured out of really light foam. Others have real feathers or wire in them. It is really a mix of materials that suit the different designs best.

You’ve worked with Annabelle before. Has the process for Broken Wings been the same?

For me all new productions feel like a new journey. The more you work together the better you get to understand each other’s way of thinking and creating, where priorities lie, what the focus should be. I have the feeling our work together grows because of that and I must say that dealing with such a great artist as Frida Kahlo made the whole process more intense this time: there is so much material to use and choose from! Every little detail you find opens a dozen new boxes of inspiration you’d not seen before and you want to absorb it all.

My set design is also a box with many secrets. It starts with a very literal image, to show where we are and what’s going on, and throughout the piece it develops to a strong end image that embraces Frida as a celebration of her personality and art.