Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the open-air courtyard of an 18th-century former military encampment in Madrid, I watch flamenco dancer Rocío Molina drag herself half-naked across a white, wooden stage. A crowd has gathered here at the Condeduque cultural centre to see a work called Tablao, which Molina begins by crawling up inside a white dress draped over a chair. She gives the garment corporeal substance from within, and just as her arms start to snake into hypnotic shapes, it begins to rain.The timing might seem disastrous but, for Molina, the drizzle merely adds to the drama. What’s a little shower to an artist who has previously danced covered in paint, sand and synthetic blood?This Málaga-born dancer and choreographer has proven her provocative brand of genius by gleefully pushing past the traditional limits of flamenco and back again, leaving audiences, critics and practitioners amazed or perplexed by the further possibilities of the form. She has been called everything from a national treasure to a fraud, with her avant-garde vision and unconventional choreographic language revolutionising flamenco’s place in the wider canon of contemporary dance.The week after the Condeduque performance, Molina gives a lecture at the Autonomous University of Madrid, quoting Foucault and Pessoa, and presenting research on subjects including intimacy, detachment, greed and sexuality. She shows the dress she wore when first performing at Madrid flamenco venue Las Carboneras aged 17, while discussing her creative method of returning to a state of newness and innocence.“There have always been revolutionary people in flamenco,” she tells me afterwards, her accent marked with the distinctive twang of Spain’s south coast. “Flamenco is very young, but it’s evolved so much. It’s worn so many skins over a very short time.” The version of the form recognised today is often traced back to the late 19th century.Contrary to the romantic notion of flamenco dancers carrying it in the blood, the tradition doesn’t run in Molina’s family — her journey has been her own. Raised in the seaside town of Torre del Mar, she was dancing weekly at a nearby restaurant by the age of three. A child prodigy soon performing at local festivals, clubs and private parties, she eventually moved to Madrid at 15 to train at the Royal Conservatory. Two decades later, she became the first flamenco dancer to win the Venice Biennale’s Silver Lion.Now approaching 40, Molina is firmly established as one of flamenco’s most rebellious figures, but this risk-taking streak showed itself early. She tells me that as a teenager she would go to Madrid nightclubs alone and lose herself in the songs, then rush home to use moves she discovered on the dance floor to create new flamenco choreography.The past decade has been eventful and transformative. She became a single mother through artificial insemination and created a work about the experience. She moved to Seville’s rural outskirts to live in a former oil mill, where she hosts residencies for flamenco artists. Following the birth of her first child and a dramatic shift in her life priorities, she experienced a crippling artistic crisis. She has referred to it as a “depression” that robbed her of all desire to create. But, eventually, she lent into it in order to overcome it. “I gave it space to happen,” she says, “and committed myself to understanding it through continuing to dance.” What emerged was Trilogía Sobre la Guitarra, a series of three works that mark a return to the most elemental codes between dancer and guitarist.Compared with highly scenographic pieces such as Bosque Ardora and Caída del Cielo, the guitar trilogy strips back some of the gimmicks. “I’m not looking for theatricality,” Molina says, “all I need is a guitar.” Still, the sense of spectacle is there, with each component work evoking a different essence: Inicio is delicate and intimate, while Vuelta a Uno is raunchy and explosive. At the 2021 world premiere of the latter in Madrid, I watched Molina, dressed in hot pink, marking the compás (flamenco beat) by popping bubblegum and fizzing sherbet.The darkest of the three is Al Fondo Riela, which Molina will perform at London’s Flamenco Festival at Sadler’s Wells this week. Lyrical and exhilarating at times, otherworldly and unsettling at others, this work has her darting between two guitarists, spurred by each into frenzied footwork; she performs a farruca (a stern, energetic style, historically danced by men) wearing a glossy black sombrero, later emerging in a bata de cola (long-trained, ruffled dress) to dance soleá (a lyrical, melancholic style with a slow, complex rhythm).Molina’s flamenco technique is exemplary, but it’s the seemingly non-flamenco elements of her work that often get people talking: the distorted, angular shapes of her torso, the peculiar movement of her arms, or the use of humour, text and dreamlike elements. She often tumbles slowly to the ground head first — she says it’s about renegotiating the flamenco dancer’s relationship with the floor, which they usually batter with violent footwork.There are attempts to link such aspects to other dance traditions, but Molina asserts that people compared her style to butoh before she’d ever heard of the Japanese form. Instead, the strangeness that she brings to flamenco stems from her fascination with desire, which she views as longing for the other — that which you lack, which you are not. “I’ve detached from flamenco many times,” she says. “I’ve gone far away, looked at it from the other side, but every time, I return more in love with it.”Ernesto Artillo, an artist who originally created Tablao as a performance art installation for the CA2M museum in Móstoles, says he chose Molina because “there’s a certain violence that characterises her”. For her, taking audiences to uncomfortable places is a necessary push against a patriarchal society that she says sees the female body as monstrous. Caída del Cielo, which involves the visceral depiction of a miscarriage, has been considered one of her most radically feminist works; Grito Pelao, created to perform while she was pregnant, vindicates non-heteronormative family models, with Molina reconfiguring the narrative of motherhood as a queer woman.Molina says she is electrified by gitana (Spanish Romani) dancers such as Carmen Amaya and Fernanda Romero, but also moved by the writings of Pascal Quignard and Anne Sexton, the surreal eroticism of René Magritte and the grotesque beauty of Francis Bacon. Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro was one of the inspirations for Carnación, her duet with singer Francisco Contreras, known as Niño de Elche. Yet even at her most erudite, Molina strives for what she calls embrutecimiento (dumbing down, coarsening). “It’s the brilliance of ignorance,” she says.Contreras also appears in Tablao, singing a sevillana whose lyrics refer to the dancer’s namesake, La Virgen del Rocío, an idol of the Virgin Mary found in the Andalusian province of Huelva, visited by a million pilgrims every year. Molina draws a distinction with her own journey, which she says does not look towards one place of fulfilment. Instead, it swerves and jerks in constant yearning.“I don’t like objectives,” she says. “I’m always moving forward but looking backwards. I’ve been dancing the same piece my whole life.”‘Al Fondo Riela’, June 4, Sadler’s Wells, London, sadlerswells.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
