Mexican actress Alejandra Flores brought Frida Kahlo to life through a series monologues while Colombian dancer and choreographer Beatriz Eugenia Vásquez played Frida’s alter ego with live music by Otto Cifuentes.

A lecture and performance on Frida Kahlo took place at Cerritos College on Thursday, Nov. 2 in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month and the Day of the Dead.

The event was coordinated and directed by Spanish Instructor and Chair of the Modern Language Department Froylán Cabuto and sponsored by ASCC.

The event was free and open to students and the general public.

Amy Palma, a member in the audience heard about the event on social media and decided to attend to it.

“Frida: The queen of selfies was one of the most transformative pieces of performance art I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing live. The beautiful blend of monologues and interpretive dance truly made you feel like Frida was in the room with you,” Palma said.

Before the beginning of every monologue Cabuto explained the meaning of each piece that Kahlo made and the things she was going through in her life that made her do that piece.

He showed pieces such as “My Birth,” “I am the Reincarnation,” “The Broken Column,” “My suicide,” “A few snips” and “Henry Ford Hospital”.

Flores, who played Kahlo said she fell in love with Kahlo’s character as soon as she read the scripts.

She continued by saying that she was more of a Diego Rivera fan than Kahlo because that was her icon until she played Frida for the first time 20 years ago. That’s when noticed how much she loved Kahlo and understood her art.

“I remember when I was young and I saw Frida’s paintings for the first time. I didn’t like them. They were too strong for me; too difficult to see because I didn’t know anything about her,” Flores said.

She added that the hardest part for her to play in her role was memorizing the script because it was more like poetry and it not the way everyone speaks on an everyday basis.

Flores said she changed the lines a bit because she didn’t remember the structure and it was hard to talk like Kahlo.

Cabuto said that the reason why he did this is because the Hispanic Committee reached out to him and wanted him to do a presentation on Frida Kahlo.

He says he wanted to create a performance through monologues, dance and music.

“At some point, students get so bored because we lecture all the time so I wanted to create a performance so the public would learn who Frida Kahlo was through a series of monologues where the actors would perform through dance and music that would convey this meaning,” Cabuto said.