FLOODESIGN

When Ernst was incarcerated, first by the French and then by the Nazis, Carrington fled to Franco's Spain, where her stress led to a nervous breakdown and admission into an asylum. (She later documented the experience in her book "Down Below," a memoir that reads as descent into the netherworld.) Her family eventually attempted to transfer her to an institution in South Africa; instead, she fled to a Mexican diplomat who brought her to his country after a hasty marriage. It was in Mexico, where Carrington lived until her death, that she was fully able to develop her art. Some of her fellow artists saw themselves diminished in a nation of such magic. As Dalí famously commented after one visit, "I can't be in a country that is more Surrealist than my paintings." But Carrington's Mexico City life imparted space to breathe deeply, to create a world safe from violent political upheaval and her overbearing family. Located between sleep and wakefulness, her creations teem with human animals, supernatural queens and androgynous self-portraiture. She came late to Surrealism, but — like that of her friends Remedios Varo and Kati Horna, as well as Lee Miller, Leonor Fini, Helen Lundeberg, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning, Méret Oppenheim and Rosa Rolanda — Carrington's work enriched the movement with experiences beyond the understanding of her male counterparts. To acknowledge the entirety of Surrealism's possibilities is to honor these women's contributions. Double Edge Theatre's "Leonora and Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro" was at first focused solely on the Chilean director, writer and magician Alejandro Jodorowsky; it was the company founder Stacy Klein's repulsion to the news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign that summoned Carrington. "I just recognized the way that Hillary [Clinton] was being treated was completely different than any [male candidate], whether I agreed or disagreed with them," Klein remembered. "It was the same as the whore-Madonna [dichotomy] that's been going on for thousands of years. She was an awful bitch, or a vulnerable person who couldn't walk on her own, who cried." Klein thought Clinton surely must triumph, forcing society to reckon with her as a president and with the weight that position implied. Of course, this never came to pass. And Klein made a decision: "to never work on a piece again that didn't have the leading voice of a woman." So Jodorowsky needed a check and balance, a female voice that those familiar with his work will know is often lacking in his real life. For some, the cult filmmaker's work is overshadowed by his treatment of women — from his Twitter comments asserting that a woman could dress up her lover "as the person who abused you, and it will excite you," to the murky ethics of engaging an "El Topo" actress in sexual activity Carlos Uriona in rehearsal for "Leonora and Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro." Photo: Milena Dabova "The Chrysopeia of Mary the Jewess," by Leonora Carrington, 1964. Oil on canvas. Digital image © 2017. Museum Associates - LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY. 50 www.peakperfs.org

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