Click here to download the Las Fridas Press Kit: MarkDeGarmo_ Las Fridas _ PressKit 2021
We are booking Las Fridas: A Movement Installation and Offering, a 60-minute transcultural transdisciplinary duet inspired by the life, loves, suffering, and artwork of Mexican painter and revolutionary Frida Kahlo. Click here for Booking Inquiries.
Las Fridas calls on each community engaging with it to examine their own histories, heritages and assumptions about Kahlo, gender, and aging. Our touring casts include 2 women, 2 men, and a man and a woman playing Frida.
We engage communities with Las Fridas by collaborating with local artists, architects, and designers to develop the set design. In addition to single or multiple performances, we also offer artist/scholar residencies tailored to the interests of your communities.
The work was originally projected to be performed in intimate gatherings, but its operatic scale also makes it suitable for larger venues. These formal and informal spaces include: black box, museum, cultural center, library, gallery, and studio.
To book Las Fridas: info@markdegarmodance.org
- Not scared to push the audience right up to the edge that the performers are living on.
– November 2019 audience member - Wonderfully in your face, both literally and metaphorically.
– November 2019 audience member - “Las Fridas” is a new form. It combines theater, movement and dance, performance art, visual art, and music, including the performers own vocalizations. We are still at the threshold of transgenerative awareness and fluid identity shifting and self-identification, which opens new realms of possibility for the individual and the collective across cultures around the world.
– Barnett Serchuk, BroadwayWorld.com - There were moments that they were kind of toeing the line between life and death, violence and peace. And they didn’t hesitate to take us through those states of comfort and discomfort with them.
– November 2019 audience member
- At this dire moment, when art-making seems pointless as bombs fall from the sky across the globe, this evening, presented as an offering to those who’ve passed from our realm, provided a crucial and meaningful remembrance. Leaving the studio theater, orange marigold petals lead us over its threshold, just as they do in traditional Day of the Dead celebrations. As I walk away from the marigolds into the outside world, I feel the shift in energy. The spirits have been left behind to rest.
– Veronica Jiao, Dance Enthusiast, November 2023
- What I observed: beauty, cruelty, eeriness, pain, hints of supernaturalism, complementary existences (I mean, the way you and she interacted), a strong hint of Kahlo’s culture and surroundings. I’d hope to locate a commonality between this art form and other visual arts, such as Kahlo’s, but I’d have to study her a lot more closely.
– November 2023 audience member
- It’s very moving. It’s very touching. It’s very creative. (. . .) I just feel very thankful that I came tonight. And very thankful to these two extraordinary artists. They truly are artists.
– November 2023 audience member
- I’ve been reading about the piece. And I know that Mark’s performance style is ‘in your face’, and boy did I get that tonight. I mean I’m just bowled over, particularly the part where he was the bull and snorting and spitting, and how anybody can just be so in it that they can scream like that. I mean it just curdled my blood. It’s just very very powerful. The whole thing was very powerful.
– November 2023 audience member