“In this scene, Frida Kahlo is getting more and more injections for her pain, at the same time she drinks a lot and smokes a lot,” Ms. Lopez Ochoa explained. “Then she has just witnessed her husband cheating on her, so she drinks more. So, we’re going to come in as dervishes, completely drunk.”

The men set off whirling across the floor, their skirts swirling. Their movements mimicked poses from Kahlo’s self-portraits: hands folded at the waist, or crossed over the chest.

“Hold your skirt, passé, leap!” Ms. Lopez Ochoa instructed. “Now, Frida pukes a butterfly, because she’s in a wheelchair, but she wants to be free.”

Ms. Lopez Ochoa, who grew up in Belgium with a Colombian father and a Belgian mother, said that she’d heard of contemporary dance productions about Kahlo, but never a classical ballet.

“I was brought up in Belgium, and the ballet world is a white world — and I was taught that art had to be this intellectual thing, and I could never use my own culture, my own traditions in dance,” she said. “So it’s such a big thing that I can bring some Latino flair into the ballet.”