The Italian Cultural Institute is presenting a performance inspired by Frida Kahlo and Ingeborg Bachmann, Viva la Vita, at ActionBase, Naxxar, on Wednesday, January 19, at 8 p.m.
Dramatic femme fatale, great woman artist, Frida Kahlo (popularised by the film Frida) charmed, loved and was loved by illustrious names of both sexes. She lived a 47-year life of extreme physical suffering, contracting polio at age six, destroyed in a catastrophic traffic accident at age 18.
Fighting for life by sheer determination, Frida took up painting: "I paint my own reality. I paint because I need to, whatever passes through my head. I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."
Her self-portraits - a third of her works - radiate her sensual, seductively powerful beauty which attracted illustrious lovers, among whom André Breton's wife and Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's affair with her began when he and his wife were her guests.
Frida and her husband, arrested (but released) for Trotsky's murder, enjoyed saying they invited him to Mexico "just to get him killed". The truth is still unknown - they were fantastic storytellers.
One of post-war Europe's innovative authors, Ingeborg Bachmann was 12 when she saw Nazi troops marching into her Austrian home town: "That was the end of my childhood". Central themes of her poetry and prose are love's difficulties, guilt, the mindless forces breaking frail human aspirations, anguished experiences, mythology, sterile relationships. Her entire oeuvre, acclaimed as a struggle against fascism and a critique of post-war society, highlights constant war and woman's absence from a patriarchal society.
Roman actress Nathalie Mentha (Teatro Potlach) asks: "What could Kahlo and Bachmann share? I travel between them in space and time, gradually understanding, seeing myself reflected in them, following memory and fantasy maps, my feet concretely designing the earth. Poets speak about themselves in verse, painters in colour. Do I, Performer, narrate myself? Through technique I meet my roles, through my roles I speak about myself."
January at ActionBase opens an international programme which Gruppi ghall-Inkontri tal-Bniedem is preparing. The 15th and 16th sees Glen Calleja's one-man performance Ir-Rikkieb tat-Tempesta, Gruppi's new work (information being released soon) and the 19th sees Viva la Vita.
Seat reservations (supporting fees: Lm4 for each performance, Lm7 block reservation for both) can be made from Friday at Sapienza's Library, Valletta. Maximum seating space being under 100, early reservations are strongly recommended. For more information e-mail victore@maltanet.net