FRIDA KAHLO, MY REALITY, AT THE THEATRE FRANCIS GAG IN NICE

Friday 10 March 2023

Published on the: Resonances Lyriques Org

Bénédicte Allard © Meghann Stanley

Standing ovation for this one-woman show at the Francis Gag theatre in Nice! The lights dim on the vibrant self-portrait of Frida Kahlo, with her hair cut, sitting on her yellow chair... releasing a free tear!

One minute! Two minutes! Three minutes of applause!? How many hours? Loud, very loud! How loud? Strong like a heart that wants to live, a heart that wants to bite into the apple! The apple of Adam, in this case Diego, the man loved by Frida and represented by this fruit of temptation to whom she speaks and with whom she poses on her invisible painting, delimited by a black frame, floating in the empty space of the stage. Diego Rivera, the great Mexican artist whom she refers to as "her second accident in life", in addition to the accident in which she was seriously injured on the bus at the age of 18.

She was luminous; she is talented; she will be victorious! Frida Kahlo, interpreted but also written by Bénédicte Allard, is indeed her! With that spunk, that dog that appeals to men and women alike: "What I see is the heart, the centre, where a state pulsates, a promise; where the symbiosis of soul and blood beats". Frida, the avant-gardist, likes to be before her gender.

Bénédicte looks just like her, with her black, pointed eyes like an arrow aiming at its target; with her passion-red, revolution-red lips, defying all sensuality as well as any reply: "I slept with the paint! "With her bright flowers growing out of her long hair, which she cuts on stage like a provocation; with her dress coloured with Mexican joy (1); with her outspokenness and her Spanish verb (2), which tattoo her just as much as her stiff leg, which she drags across the stage like she carries her cross; with her whole character, made up of yeses and noses, but never of little being. This is how we imagine her, really how we imagine her, Frida in flesh and blood, dislocated and broken, but reaching for the sky, the sky-blue of a bridge to.... Magdalena Frida Carmen, how else could you be with such a name?

Bénédicte Allard studied her for a long time, intensely, during her studies of philosophy and psychology, before giving birth to this masterpiece. In her dissertation on the concept of collapse, she meets first the woman, then the artist, the phoenix reborn from every physical or psychological rupture. I was alone," says the only heroine, "I'm alone, we're all alone. I just learned that very early on". Attracted, sucked in by the character, the author writes her ailments as a hymn to life: "I'll always run faster than you," Frida taunts Diego, her alter ego, from the top of her crutch, "because I've got death on my tail!"

In a deconstructed set, without skeleton or column, everything exists without structure: a jar of brushes far from his paintings, an inversion table where the painter's body falls over... What is his reality??? It's the fractures, the shards of carcass, the fragments of stories, the snags of fate, the rubble of energy, the ashes of existence from which springs... Love! "Te quiero", she repeats as she embraces her leg, which has shackled her for the rest of her life, even though a year after losing it to gangrene, she lost herself when she left life, just after writing "Viva la Vida" ("Long Live Life") at the heart of her last painting. "I love saying I love you, I love saying I love you. I love saying I love you. Excuse me for repeating the word love so often, but it's important. You have to say I love you. You have to say I love you. I love you!" she boldly tells the audience.

Its reality?... "Amor and Death".

Here she is, addressing the audience, simply showing herself, without artifice. Even her crude words like "hijo de puta" are not vulgar, they ring so true. Frida Kahlo, what nerve! Here she is giving her audience a painting lesson and posing as a model, bathed in lighting (3) alternating colours that convey symbols and cast shadows.

Spectres of framed paintings without images evoke her art without supplanting it: "We're not going to have an exhibition here," director Clément Althaus explains to Bénédicte as she proudly prints out several paintings by the Mexican artist for the rehearsals. Looking at a painting means choosing a time to take your time. So this is not a theatre. Instead, we'll use symbols to evoke the artist's paintings and her life": here, a red cap for Alex, her first lover, Alejandro Arias; there, a camera representing her photographer father; elsewhere, slices of citrus fruit planted one by one to bring her still lifes to life... "The canvas is the stage for the artist's work. The canvas is the stage," concludes Clément.

And in these particles of exploded space, atoms of time explode the chronological line, colliding around his last exhibition in 1953, which for the first time - and the last - will be entirely devoted to him; balls of moments suddenly hiccup in bubbles of sighs, in drops of piano, born of the inspiration of Clément Althaus, also a musical creator, gentle enough to evaporate pain, exhale an anaesthetic cloud, colonise molecules of dreams, absorb dusts of truce. Thumbs up! The vivid poetry of the boards and prose suddenly plunges its dense emotions into weightlessness...

A one-woman show, born of the 'obvious' meeting of two immense talents: that of an exceptional author and actress, and that of a director and artist (4) who is a virtuoso of space and time... So go and find a one(wo)man show where not a single second stretches over the other, where not an eye is heavy, where not a word buzzes!..!

Kahlo ? A gift... of life, to be offered without counting the cost to all those who still lack faith in the impossible! It was in the nineteen hundreds with Frida, it is today with Bénédicte!

Kahlo ? Y aller au galop ! (5)

Nathalie Audin

(1) Costumes : Babette Puget

(2) Référent linguistique : Jérôme Besse

(3) Lumières : Raphaël Maulny

(4) Metteur en scène, comédien, musicien, interprète, compositeur, chanteur lyrique :  https://www.start361.com/

(5) Suivre l’artiste : https://www.benedicteallard.com/actrice