Innovative only begins to describe the wild ride the audience goes on with this show. Rocío Molina not only fills the whole room with her emotional reach and mesmerising form, but the audience is forced to the edge of their seats in anticipation of what she is going to do next. She embodies the stare-you-down passion and bullring energy that is at the heart of flamenco, but you won’t have caught anything like this on your last holiday to the Costa del Sol.
In 2022, La Biennale di Venezia awarded Rocío Molina the Silver Lion. Wayne McGregor wrote in his motivation for the award: “Molina’s avant-garde, extravagant and powerfully raw choreographies fuse traditional flamenco with modern dance styles and impulsos – improvisations that characterise her unique dance language. Indeed, Molina has coined her own artistic language based on a recalibrated traditional flamenco style which respects its essence but embraces the genuinely new. Radically free, Molina combines in her works: technical virtuosity, contemporary research, and conceptual risk. Unafraid to forge alliances with other disciplines and artists, her choreographies are unique scenic events based on ideas and cultural forms ranging from cinema to literature, including philosophy and painting.…Molina weaves a 21st Century dialogue with the past to reinvent a fresh future for the form – speaking directly to the now in honest and evocative terms. She seems to tear though the classical ‘rule’ book to construct her own volumes, inspiring and moving us to look and feel anew”.
Molina is certainly capable of producing more energy than most should have the right to. She creates a firestorm of force on stage. A complete pocket rocket.
Over the course of ninety We travel through the stages of a woman’s life, the roles they choose or have to play, and the moons that she lives through. Clothes come on and off, a constant shedding and re-dressing as Molina repeatedly gives birth to herself, all the while dancing at the peak of physical agility and precision. Her first dress feels like a primordial beginning, a fossil found in a swamp, the cream of a clam shell, at times swallowing her up, at times inviting and provocative. Leathers and straps make an appearance, as does somewhat incongruously a routine with potato chips, but then the wonderful idea of having her in a plastic bata de cola dress, dripping in a fake blood dark red substance that she drags across the floor, horizontally dancing to manoeuvre the skirts, flip-flopping the heavy marks that we watch being made from a camera above. The rest of her body is marked in the process, and afterwards her feet are reverently washed on stage, before she’s off to another version of life.
Caída del Cielo (Fallen from Heaven)
Her Majesty’s Theatre
58 Grote St, Adelaide
