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 Roc\u00edo 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\u2019s a little shower to an artist who has previously danced covered in paint, sand and synthetic blood?This M\u00e1laga-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\u2019s 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.\u201cThere have always been revolutionary people in flamenco,\u201d she tells me afterwards, her accent marked with the distinctive twang of Spain\u2019s south coast. \u201cFlamenco is very young, but it\u2019s evolved so much. It\u2019s worn so many skins over a very short time.\u201d 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\u2019t run in Molina\u2019s family \u2014 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\u2019s Silver Lion.Now approaching 40, Molina is firmly established as one of flamenco\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cdepression\u201d that robbed her of all desire to create. But, eventually, she lent into it in order to overcome it. \u201cI gave it space to happen,\u201d she says, \u201cand committed myself to understanding it through continuing to dance.\u201d What emerged was Trilog\u00eda 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 Ca\u00edda del Cielo, the guitar trilogy strips back some of the gimmicks. \u201cI\u2019m not looking for theatricality,\u201d Molina says, \u201call I need is a guitar.\u201d 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 comp\u00e1s (flamenco beat) by popping bubblegum and fizzing sherbet.The darkest of the three is Al Fondo Riela, which Molina will perform at London\u2019s Flamenco Festival at Sadler\u2019s 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 sole\u00e1 (a lyrical, melancholic style with a slow, complex rhythm).Molina\u2019s flamenco technique is exemplary, but it\u2019s 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 \u2014 she says it\u2019s about renegotiating the flamenco dancer\u2019s 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\u2019d 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 \u2014 that which you lack, which you are not. \u201cI\u2019ve detached from flamenco many times,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve gone far away, looked at it from the other side, but every time, I return more in love with it.\u201dErnesto Artillo, an artist who originally created Tablao as a performance art installation for the CA2M museum in M\u00f3stoles, says he chose Molina because \u201cthere\u2019s a certain violence that characterises her\u201d. For her, taking audiences to uncomfortable places is a necessary push against a patriarchal society that she says sees the female body as monstrous. Ca\u00edda 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 Ren\u00e9 Magritte and the grotesque beauty of Francis Bacon. Caravaggio\u2019s chiaroscuro was one of the inspirations for Carnaci\u00f3n, her duet with singer Francisco Contreras, known as Ni\u00f1o de Elche. Yet even at her most erudite, Molina strives for what she calls embrutecimiento (dumbing down, coarsening). \u201cIt\u2019s the brilliance of ignorance,\u201d she says.Contreras also appears in Tablao, singing a sevillana whose lyrics refer to the dancer\u2019s namesake, La Virgen del Roc\u00edo, 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.\u201cI don\u2019t like objectives,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m always moving forward but looking backwards. I\u2019ve been dancing the same piece my whole life.\u201d\u2018Al Fondo Riela\u2019, June 4, Sadler\u2019s Wells, London, sadlerswells.comFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 Roc\u00edo 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-99703","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99703"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99704,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99703\/revisions\/99704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}