Rocío Molina: A flamenco goddess of style and wit - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Kaija Pepper
Rocío Molina has been dancing since the age of three, in 1987. The Malaga-born artist choreographed her first work, Entre paredes (Among the Walls) at age 22, and has made over a dozen more to date. She has worked with flamenco stars such as María Pagés and Israel Galván, and with the great Carlos Saura, dancing an unforgettable garrotín, a cigarillo dangling from her mouth, in his 2010 film, Flamenco Flamenco. All to say: Rocío Molina knows her dance.
Caída del Cielo (Fallen from Heaven), which premiered in 2016 in Paris, finally made its Canadian debut in Vancouver after an earlier Covid-caused cancellation. All four shows at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre of the Arts September 27-30 were sold out.
On opening night, Molina gave us an evening filled with theatrical charm: with her four musicians (Óscar Lago, Kiko Peña, José Manuel Ramos “Oruco” and Pablo Martín Jones) she entertained superbly, and also challenged the audience. The show has great style and imagination, taking off on all kinds of contemporary flights of fancy, while remaining grounded in a mastery of the age-old tradition of flamenco music and dance. There was plenty of reason to shout olé (as audiences often do at the Vancouver International Flamenco Festival, who co-presented the evening along with DanceHouse and SFU Woodward’s): Molina in motion is a powerhouse of style and substance.
On the cusp of turning 40, Molina is at an age where youthful energy and mature experience intersect: she leads the evening’s magical transformations, onstage almost non-stop for 90 minutes, with boundless energy and impeccable theatricality. For a few minutes, barefoot, she explodes to the frenzied sounds of an electric guitar (reminiscent of maverick contemporary soloist Louise Lecavalier, seen last season on the same stage); at other times, in silence or to a soft flamenco melody, her arms, fingers, legs and toes flow with infinite care, her body a slow-moving stream on a summer day. In flamenco shoes, she lets fly a burst of rhythm with peerless speed and precision.
Fallen from Heaven is structured as a series of distinct scenes, which Molina prepares for by dressing and undressing in front of us, assisted by the male musicians. At the end of a scene in which she wears a skirt that is covered in brown paint, one of them brings out a basin and washes her feet. In another, the men eat chips from small bags, won’t give her any and then paste one of the bags onto her groin. She leaves it there while dancing with saucy erotic allusions and even a moment of bump and grind. A bit of nonsense for sure, but the woman is an artist in command of the tools of her trade, and the scene is a comic delight of female empowerment.
There are many other scenes, all equally inventive, and much more fabulous flamenco between Molina and the musicians, who were in tune with her every rhythmic and dramatic whim. As were we: near the end, when Rocío Molina ran up the aisles throwing flowers, the audience went wild.
