It's early days for Caroline Bowditch's latest project - the piece won't actually be premiered, in Nottingham, until May.
But already, despite the cramped little space at CCA - and Bowditch's post-show revelation that there was actually one company member missing - there's no doubting that Falling In Love With Frida is one to watch, savour and then reflect on at length.
At first, the bold criss-crossing between movement, text, music and performative actions, registers like a massive crush on the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). Kahlo died before Bowditch was born: a face-to-face encounter will never happen. But that doesn't scupper Bowditch's obsessive immersion in the minutiae of Kahlo's life, loves and artworks. Clad, like her two on-stage associates - dancer Welly O'Brien, and British Sign Language interpreter, Yvonne Strain - in the colours and full-skirted clothes Kahlo favoured, Bowditch revels in itemising what she knows of the woman who so fascinates her.
But gradually what emerges, not least in a deliciously wry, humorously conversational - and disarmingly frank - monologue is a statement of Bowditch's own life experiences as a disabled woman, and an artist. And, like Frida, Bowditch chooses to get the juice out of life. Cue a wonderful sequence where all three women get stuck into slices of watermelon with happily messy gusto.
There is, however, a profound and thought-provoking undercurrent to the mood of sensuality, sexual discoveries and self-fulfilment and that is to do with how other people perceive, or remember us. What, if anything, is legacy? Frida never knew that 50 years after her death, Bowditch would lovingly celebrate her in a performance that is, in itself, full of memorable vitality.
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