Rocío Molina is a ferocious, fearless performer. She’s mesmerising to watch, both for her superb flamenco technique and because she always seems so absolutely herself. From punk experiments to her most stripped-back dance, there is no one else like her.
Her new show Calentamiento, part of the Sadler’s Wells Flamenco Festival, takes the concept of warming up and stretches it like toffee. It becomes a way to explore work, love, death, identity, taking in a diva curtain call and a dance performed under a heap of chairs. She strips her art back to its building blocks, then twists them into spun sugar or molten heat.
The show starts before it starts, which is the point. As the audience comes into the theatre, Molina is already on stage, going doggedly through her stretches. There’s nothing flashy or super-bendy about it, just work, work, work. When she puts on her shoes to dance, it’s the next step in a process that will never stop.
Warming up her feet will take 35 minutes, she explains: “If you’re bored by watching me warm up, you should leave now, because I’ll never stop beginning.” (Her text, by co-director Pablo Messiez, is spoken in Spanish, with English surtitles.) She stamps on the spot, working her heels, building up speed. As she does it, she tells us what happens in her body: which leg she’s working, when she starts to sweat, working through a pain barrier until physical tiredness becomes a form of freedom. The discipline grounds her, schools her ego.
As a performance, it’s like Bach or Philip Glass, patterns building with sure theatrical shape. Her momentum never falters. 140 beats per minute becomes 160, 180, then 181, “because too much is never enough.” Molina moves with sleek control, but the repetition lets her access a kind of wildness. She starts to weave fragments of story into it, references to a broken love affair. It’s the warm up as both meditation and as virtuoso display.
In the show that follows, Molina is always beginning, questioning where she’s got to and driving relentlessly forward. One scene frames beginning as a rebellion against death. Insisting on all the things she hasn’t done yet, she pours herself across the stage, folding and unfolding. She’ll let herself be ungainly, legs sprawled wide or hips jerking; she won't waste time on daintiness.
A steel chair starts as a prop, something to grab for balance, but turns out to have a mind of its own – it goes skittering across the stage on wires. The sound design, by Javier Álvarez, is superb: every tap, every gasp, every scrape of a metal chair.
Endings become beginnings, too. Taking the applause after a solo, she turns it into a very funny dance. The mock-modest dip of her shoulders becomes a silky, self-dramatising backbend. She bows herself into a heap on the floor. When musician José Manuel Ramos “Oruco” hauls her upright, Molina flops like a rag doll, turning somersaults as she refuses to stand. Then he reminds her it’s time to warm up, and she leaps to her feet.
While she’s alone for most of the two-hour show, her duet with “Oruco” is a glimpse of connection. He bosses her like a rehearsal director, insisting she check this or that aspect of technique. He’s a fellow obsessive, ranting that she’s wrong to blend two styles, or purring olé! when at last he’s pleased with a pose. They’re fond and flirty together, but it’s the romance of shared work.
Her singers suggest the rest of life going on, while their star is obsessively beginning. Cabo San Roque’s designs put a slice of backstage on view. Hidden or revealed by Carlos Marquerie’s lighting, a tall narrow box suggests the wings of a theatre, with a stack of chairs and Molina’s four singers, wedged in as they gossip before the show. As they bow and take selfies, Molina slips back into her warmup loop, forever beginning again.
