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- "Wings to Fly:Frida Kahlo Boléro": dance performance and live-music at Pratt Institute, Brooklin, US
"Wings to Fly:Frida Kahlo Boléro": dance performance and live-music at Pratt Institute, Brooklin, US
24 August 2026
"Wings to Fly: Frida Kahlo Boléro" captures an artist whose life story and influence often symbolize intersections of aesthetics, gender identities, cultural affiliations, and spiritual realms. Oxana Chi's choreography draws inspiration from the renowned Béjart Boléro while merging ballet with Caribbean bélè dance and German movement styles. Layla Zami’s saxophone sounds and loops are grounded in both classical and contemporary music, incorporating elements of jazz and Caribbean rhythms. Dr. Zami, a former faculty member at Pratt, provides context for the performance through a transnational feminist lens, discussing themes of sensuality and desire, transgression, and the (a)temporal spiraling present in Kahlo’s art.
Beyond this framework, the lecture-performance also examines how Black diasporic women's contemporary visual art addresses the relationships between homes, bodies, and historical trauma.
Dr. Layla Zami is an interdisciplinary academic and artist born in Paris with a Caribbean-Jewish heritage.
Oxana Chi is an internationally active dancer-choreographer, curator, filmmaker and visual artist born in Germany of Eastern Nigerian and Eastern European descent. Her repertoire comprises 20 productions, including commissions for The Kitchen New York and Humboldt-University Berlin.
The notorious Boléro was originally composed by Maurice Ravel in 1928 as a commissioned work for the dancer and art patron Ida Rubinstein.
Pictures of the dance performance at the Oxana Chi website.
September 8, 2026, 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Alumni Reading Room, Pratt Library, 3rd floor, 200 Willoughby Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205
Logistics and details of The Pratt show at the link below.
