Rocío Molina: Calentamiento review – an electrifying blast of punky flamenco

Rocío Molina has completely redefined what flamenco can be. Some purists say she’s not flamenco at all, and when, three quarters of the way through her latest piece, Calentamiento, she sits down at a drum kit and starts bashing out a 4/4 rock beat, maybe you would agree with them. But however crazy things get two hours in, everything is built on the pure craft of the flamenco dancer, and that’s where we start in this piece on the subject of beginnings. Calentamiento means warming up, which is what Molina is doing on stage before the audience has even sat down. She begins a footwork drill, a 12-beat phrase, the same one she has done since she was seven years old, she tells us. At 140bpm, she likes to start slowly (!), she says. Heels and toes hammer out the dancer’s daily ritual, the same way even the most prima of ballerinas starts each day back at the barre with a plié; the constant discipline of beginning again. There are lots of questions and lessons for life here. Why do we keep starting over? How do we keep going? She must keep beginning so that it never ends, says Molina, while her beats spark like a series of electric shocks. The “warm-up”, the whole first hour of her show, lays out her genius. Some of Molina’s recent work has tended towards the opaque, but working with writer/director Pablo Messiez, she makes direct connection with the audience, reveals her rituals, asks for a cigarette, chats to us as she ups the tempo to 180bpm, “getting acquainted with the pain”, she says, relishing pushing through that barrier. She is a brilliant technician and she dances with absolute decisiveness, every pose of her body distinct and distinctive. It all comes from a powerful centre, a steel core – when you feel your balance going, she says, hold your arm out as if stopping a bus: the mundane, the comic, the sublime, all in one moment. At this point there’s only the sound of her feet, and the way she uses rhythm, tone and colour is a kind of storytelling in itself. Mo…