00:00I have two icons, Frida and Diego, but inside a dream, inside not a biographic story, inside
00:09a mythic story, and the duality, life and death, love, passion and conflict and turbulence.
00:19I thought about how I could bring this aesthetic, this language through the stage, through dance,
00:27through movement, and I decided the surrealism will help me to do this journey.
00:39So the opera happens on the De Edvers Muertos, the Day of the Dead, this moment where it's
00:45almost like a feast of fools, where people can talk to the people that have passed.
00:50The set is a very kind of forced perspective, raked, earth-cracked pallet that opens up during
00:58the show and allows the underworld to come from beneath.
01:01We need to feel that these people are crossing a threshold between life and death on this
01:07Dia dos Muertos, a moment.
01:08Then I had this idea of the break dancers, the popping, popping dancers, because they
01:15can dance through their bones.
01:19And I wanted to have these people around with skulls and skeletons, that it's related, especially
01:25in Mexico, with the underworld.
01:35So we were able to visit the Casa Resul, Frida's home that she spent much of her life in.
01:40And we got to look at the embroidery and the detail on her corsetry and really study what
01:47that was.
01:48We've been very careful to kind of try and put the reality of those things that she
01:53were on stage, whether that be the corsetry and those things that bound her and kept her
01:58very entrapped, and the plaster that was so rigid on her.
02:06Frida was prison inside her body, but she found free inside this prison.
02:13This is so intense, so beautiful.
02:17And then at the heart of our design, I've created a tree, which is the tree of life.
02:25It's the tree of death.
02:26It's this thing that sits between these two worlds.
02:29It's red.
02:30It's very arterial.
02:32It's got these kind of, these branches and these roots that reference her work.
02:37A lot of her work has these references to her heritage and her generational kind of blood
02:43ties, whether that be through kind of tree imagery or veins that kind of come out of kind of
02:50almost anatomical viewpoints of parts of her body, like the heart.
02:54So these references were all the way through her work visually, and I've tried to kind of
02:59pull them together throughout.
03:00out.
03:02Diego is different, his paintings and the moral and the politics inside, social
03:12things, real people with the real society.
03:18When I am in front of one mural, of Diego, it's something that, whoa.
03:25What is this?
03:29act two begins when diego's world he has this epic scale to him
03:38we go from the kind of personal of frida to something that's bigger grander this this kind
03:44of deity that he kind of almost considered himself to be climbing the scaffold that
03:49taking into the heavens in these big epic paintings and murals that he created
03:58the set it's needs to be interactive we need to part to to to use to move to be inside
04:07to change
04:08through the body through movement to change the scenes everything it's in it's happened on the
04:15stage no it's not magic we are building all all these different places different worlds
04:23and different moments
