A Hair Out of Paralyzed-Place: Frida Kahlo's Metaphoric Choreography

Abstract

In this article, I position Frida Kahlo, a disabled female painter whose work and body displayed minimal movement as a radical choreographer. I do this by examining her redefinition of space as well as her resistant micro-movements to post-revolutionary representational archetypes. Using micro-choreography as a critical lens, I locate resistant movements in the still objects depicted in Kahlo's oeuvre and worn on her body—the painted hair in "Self Portrait with Cropped Hair" and wounds in "Broken Column," and the plaster casts she wore. Her work embodies and resists opposing hegemonic post-revolutionary social constructs that neither froze nor fragmented her identity. Importantly, Kahlo's performs this choreography. Her metaphoric and embodied movement, like the constraints of post-revolutionary Mexican archetypes and architecture, is theatrical. Intersecting dance studies, performance studies, and visual studies, I show how Kahlo's resistant movements dissolve traditional definitions of performance art, visual art, theater, life, and even dance.