Rocío Molina: Calintamento Review – A Thrilling Explosion of Wicked Flamenco Music | platform

Rocío Molina has completely redefined flamenco. Some purists say it’s not flamenco at all, and when, three-quarters of the way through her latest track, Calentamiento, she sits down at the drum kit and starts banging out 4/4 rock rhythms, you might agree with them. But no matter how crazy the two-hour stuff is, it’s all built on the pure craft of the flamenco dancer, and that’s where we start this piece on the theme of beginnings.

Calentamiento means warming up, which is what Molina does on stage even before the audience is seated. She started practicing footwork, a 12-beat phrase, the same exercise she’s done since she was 7, she told us. She says she likes to start slow at 140 beats per minute (!). Heels and toes highlight a dancer’s daily ritual, in the same way that even the most accomplished ballet dancers begin each day at the bar with a tuck; The constant discipline of starting over.

There are a lot of questions and lessons for life here. Why do we keep starting over? How do we continue? It has to keep going from the beginning so it never ends, Molina says, while rousing her beats like a series of electric shocks. “Warm Up,” the first hour of her show, demonstrates her genius. Some of Molina’s recent work has leaned toward the mystical, but working with writer/director Pablo Messis, she connects directly with the audience, revealing her rituals, asking for a cigarette, talking to us as she cranks up the film’s tempo to 180 beats per minute, “recognizing pain,” she says, and relishing pushing that barrier.

She is a brilliant technician and dances with absolute decisiveness, and every position of her body is distinct and distinctive. It all comes from a strong center, a heart of steel — when you feel off balance, she says, raise your arm as if you were stopping a bus: the ordinary, the comic, the sublime, all in one moment. At this point there is only the sound of her feet, and the way she uses rhythm, tone and color is a kind of storytelling in itself. Molina creates shapes with her body that no other dancer does. In one scene, choreographer Jiri Kilian appears to be playing flamenco.

“In order to dance, I have to be sweaty and tired,” Molina says. But there’s nothing tiring about what you do. Once Molina enters the “show” portion of the show, the calientamento goes off in wild directions, featuring five singers in a neon box making silly noises (as well as very skilled vocals); There are twists, drama, satire, a pile of metal chairs, and some amazing bass. She says she wants a show that never ends – this one is two hours long, with no intermission, but you have to stay with her. It’s exciting, curious, surprising, intelligent and always awe-inspiring to watch her dance (punk spirit and meticulous craftsmanship). This drive to keep moving in the face of everything may be a huge metaphor for life, but it’s also a very personal portrait of what it means to be a dancer.