Julie Taymor’s collaborators have included Seiji Ozawa, Herbert Blau, Suzushi Hanayagi and Walt Disney Theatrical Productions. Her aesthetic has borrowed from Bunraku, Indian legend, 18th Century Japanese puppetry, the Peking Opera and the song stylings of Elton John. And her media of choice ranges from opera to performance art and from folk ritual to Broadway.
Perhaps no other American working in the performing arts has worked so long and so hard to defy categorization.
And perhaps no other American working in the performing arts has such an intense and growing desire for her complex work to reach as many people as possible.
“There’s a part of Julie Taymor,” says Eileen Blumenthal, a Taymor scholar and a professor at Rutgers University, “that has always wanted to be a rock star.”
And Taymor is willing to go to the wall suggesting that popular appeal does not require any artistic compromise.
That’s why the noted theatrical conceptualist is irritated by a suggestion — which, clearly, she has heard before — that her new movie, “Frida,” an impassioned biography of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo starring Salma Hayek, should, perhaps, have been made in Spanish.
“Oh, come on. Do you think they would have given Salma the money to make this movie in Spanish?” she asks, ticked off at any implication that employing the native language of Kahlo and her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, would have conveyed a greater sense of cultural legitimacy. “‘Frida’ will get to a lot more people by being produced in English.”
As she sits amid the Day of the Dead exhibit at the Field Museum while in town earlier this month to introduce “Frida” at the Chicago International Film Festival, the restlessly eloquent Taymor is just getting started.
In her mind, artists belong to the world. Language, genres and traditions are fodder for creative assimilation, not exclusive cultural entities. Performance art forms should be culled from all across the globe.
“We never question why `The Sound of Music’ was made in English,” she continues, eyes flashing. “Should `Hamlet’ only be played by Danes? Look, I want to communicate. I like not going to one exclusive market. Limiting yourself to people who know something already is not that interesting to me.”
In the media, Taymor long has been painted as a relentless and brilliant eclectic, with an extraordinary ability to bring the multicultural theatrical hybrid to unified life.
From Bali to Oberammergau, reviews of her shows — and “Titus,” her one prior feature film — are peppered with words such as “blend,” “risk,” “experimental” and “cross-bred.”
For much of her 25-year career, Taymor labored in the high and, arguably, the esoteric arts — working on an operatic “Oedipus the King” in Japan, mask-dancers in Bali and a “Magic Flute” in Florence. Her exactitude and creativity were spotted in her youth — and her stunning visual creations later were the subject of a major touring art exhibit under the title “Playing With Fire” (it showed up at the Field Museum last year), but Taymor never was exactly what one might call mainstream.
“Only historians of European theater,” wrote Blumenthal, in her introduction to a published retrospective of Taymor’s work, “would notice how closely the stage arrangement in Taymor’s design for a Passover Haggadah pageant resembles that of the Medieval Christian plays.”
And only a theater historian would have cared.
Still, Blumenthal argues that the high art/low art dichotomy — the division, say, that makes most avant-garde artists turn up their noses at Disney — are merely western notions. “In Southeast Asia, where she cut her theatrical teeth, all of those forms of art are blended together,” Blumenthal says. “There, the highest art is also the art that’s aimed at the people.”
“For Julie, popular does not mean mass culture in the pejorative sense,” says Jeffrey Horowitz, artistic director of Theatre for a New Audience in New York and who first commissioned Taymor some 20 years ago. “She has always talked about art reaching a whole society, not just a section of society.”
“She’s used the energy of popular art to create high art,” says Robert Brustein, theater critic for the New Republic and the former artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. “Look at her work, and you really cannot separate the two.”
And since Disney was offering a blank creative check, Taymor says, she took the “Lion King” gig — a widely admired, 1998 adaptation of the Disney cartoon that has been playing on Broadway for more than five years and grossed well in excess of $250 million. A touring version will finally play Chicago, beginning next spring.
A turning point
“The Lion King” was a turning point in her career, if only for the level of popular awareness of her work that it brought — along with a belated entry into Hollywood.
But while her first movie, “Titus” (1999) was regarded as a visual feast (it was filmed in and around the ruins of ancient Rome) and a complex take on the troubled Shakespeare text that inspired it, the film was not widely seen or universally admired.
It’s not that it lacked some concessions to populism — Anthony Hopkins played the lead and Jessica Lange was cast as a Goth queen with golden armor. But the movie was charged with incoherence — and certain flashiness. And it never really caught on.
“We were fighting against an unknown Shakespeare, not-young actors in the leads and a dark subject, ” Taymor says. “There were no pretty 20-year-olds in the movie. We didn’t have the distribution behind us. They just didn’t spend any money.”
With the full backing of the professional Oscar-whisperers at the Miramax Film Corp., “Frida,” which opens in Chicago on Friday, is a very different beast.
Actually, Taymor came late to the “Frida” project, which was shopped around from one studio to another for seven years by Hayek (a co-producer), and had a pre-existing screenplay by Clancy Sigal.
“There were many writers and directors falling,” Taymor said. “I think when Salma finally went to Miramax, they came up with my name eventually.”
When the project was presented to Taymor, she says her initial response was not especially enthusiastic.
“I don’t like movies on artists,” she says. “I don’t think you can tell why an artist does what they do. I don’t think there’s any way we know why Pollock painted the way he did, or why Van Gogh painted the sunflowers.”
Given that inability to explain the unexplainable, most movies about artists focus on biography — the kind of tensions between creativity and leading a normal life that are explored so well in the theater production “Sunday in the Park With George.” Typically, particular emphasis is placed on such human dysfunctionality as boozing or womanizing.
By Taymor’s standards, at least, the $13 million “Frida” follows a fairly traditional narrative trajectory. It’s organized chronologically — beginning with the experiences of Kahlo’s youth (she suffered from a bad bus accident) and ending when the famously philandering, but ultimately aging, Rivera finally returns to his long-suffering wife and finally offers some of the loyalty she long has craved.
Theatrical advantage
Taymor argues that the film has an advantage over its peers simply because Kahlo’s life was so inherently interesting and because her art was so inherently theatrical (she even painted curtains around some of her manuscripts).
Kahlo was, after all, an artist in her own right, so the movie avoids the familiar motif (as with “Camille Claudel”) of the woman artist hidden behind the bushel of a less talented spouse. And yet one could argue that the central feature of Kahlo’s life — and the pervasive motif of Taymor’s film — was her love for Rivera, a brilliant but confounding man who found it almost impossible to be faithful.
“This is a love story,” Taymor says. “The dialectic between Frida and Diego works on its own as a drama. But because she’s an autobiographical painter, I thought I would be able to open up her creative mind and actually show why she painted what she painted.”
In other words, while she claims that abstract art cannot be explained through biographical movies, Taymor suggests that Kahlo’s work can be explained, because of the overtly autobiographical root of the art in question.
“Frida’s style lends itself to film,” Taymor says. “Her art was integrated to what was happening in her life.”
In an attempt to relate art to biography, Taymor has interspersed short animations throughout the film (she refers to them as “chapter headings”) intended to represent her paintings. When Kahlo and Rivera go to America, for example, Taymor creates a collage in Kahlo’s style, incorporating documentary footage and an aesthetic that mimics Kahlo’s actual art. Diego’s rise and fall in the United States is expressed by Kahlo sitting in a movie theater and watching the rise and fall of King Kong.
Perhaps because of her experience with “Titus,” Kahlo appears to have developed a fear of the art house. Even though “Frida” is a rather eccentric biography of a dead visual artist — generally prime fodder for consignment to the art-house ghetto — she insists this is a film with broad appeal.
“I think this film can cross over,” she says, “as long as I can get people talking about it. It’s a story with a wide audience and multiple points of entry.”
`Revenge’ project
Taymor’s next project will be a movie based on the book “Revenge: A Story of Hope,” by Washington Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld. Tony Kushner is writing the screenplay that deals with a Jewish American’s attempts to find the Palestinian who killed her father, and to come to terms with what vengeance actually means.
“That’s not the kind of thing you’d expect me to do next,” Taymor says with a certain palpable satisfaction. “Is it?”
People like Brustein say they worry that Taymor will be co-opted by Hollywood and television. “I’ve seen to happen to so many others,” he says.
But Taymor doesn’t really make those distinctions.
She looks up at the work of Mexican artists that forms part of the Day of the Dead exhibit at the Field.
“They put folk art in natural history museums, not art museums,” she says, with a short-lived buzz of irritation. “But Frida and Diego were cosmopolitans who reached many people. They were not elitists. They were populists who painted for the people.”
