Rocío Molina, beyond 'queer' flamenco

Important.

His work is literally important for flamenco.

He brings, carries something of value, and puts it into flamenco.

Rocío Molina is one of the most important artists in our country, not only for flamenco, of course.

But, for those inside flamenco, Molina is very important.

Those of us who have enjoyed and learned so much from her work are happy with the Venice award, which is like shouting from the rooftops that Rocío Molina's work is very important.

José Luis Ortiz Nuevo was the first who told me about her: “There is a girl in Malaga who is outrageous! She not only dances well, Molina is an artist”. Rocío Molina's work soon entered the space that Israel Galván had opened up for flamenco since

.

The word revolution is too publicity, too rallying if you will.

I prefer to talk about metamorphosis: the metamorphoses of Enrique Morente or Camarón de la Isla, for example, don't just affect cante, they open up territories and change parameters, rules and even change emotions in the experience of flamenco.

Rocío, by instinct and intelligence, immediately entered that territory and took it to new heights.

The way in which he gave knowledge to his body and from his body he gave knowledge to flamenco was from the first hour.

There is something of an epiphany in the appearance of Molina.

01:12

Rocío Molina, a muse in the Prado

It was called

the show in which I saw that metamorphosis for the first time.

Rocío Molina and Laura Rozalén humorously destroyed what was old in flamenco to appear with what was even older, that was the novelty.

Molina knows about the anachronistic way of doing flamenco, in which terms like tradition and avant-garde are just ways of speaking.

The amateur could escape the fashion of the old to see the truth of what changes.

pure flamingo.

Not pure in the biological sense of blood or in the traditional sense of the recipes of the trade or in the cubist sense of the austerity of lines.

“Pure” in the sense of calling you directly into the experience of the world through music and dance and the language that we continue to call flamenco.

There, humor was a founding tool.

Ramón Gómez de la Serna speaks in

of the fertility of the destruction of the wheat grain that on the one hand produces the seed and new wheat, but also the flour that makes bread, batters and sweets.

I seemed to see the fertility of that same destruction in the feet of that Rocío Molina as much as I see it now in her project for La Aceitera, the creative space that she heads in the outskirts of Seville.

Let's think about the old oil mills, the old oil mills to learn about the ointment, the balsam of bier with which La Molina cures flamenco.

I think it's from

when they begin their collaborations with Carlos Marquerie and Elena Córdoba that, beyond specific shows, signify a new transformation. The space-time of flamenco dance reaches new heights there. Flamenco is also an artistic field and that's where La Molina uses her tools. Let's think about what Rocío has done with Carmen Amaya's feet. Carmen Amaya —there is the first of her

dedicated to the Catalan woman in her neighborhood of Barcelona— revolutionizes flamenco dance with the violence of her feet, not only, as the fans think, in “women's dance”, but also in “men's dance”.

Rocío has taken that violence of the gypsy bailaora and has not tamed it, she has taken it to unprecedented heights.

She has made of that violence a destructive and constructive music at the same time.

His continuous

and

with his feet, without ending completely, in

, taking the pleasure of tapping to a paroxysm, like a kind of lesbian coitus that does not need those endings that, by way of ejaculation, continue to make flamenco so childish .

Pleasure versus desire, a celebration of the body.

And the fact is that la Molina has understood, she has used the toolbox that is flamenco to perfection.

reading

of her flamenco.

But in her work it is not about closet claims or any

advertising

Flamenco itself has tools that are close and assimilable to

it allows us, for example, to go beyond binary issues. That dialectic between binary rhythms and the affirmation of ternaries, of polyrhythms that in flamenco becomes, perhaps, an easy metaphor comes to mind. Let us think of the wonderful rhetoric of Rocío dancing with a long beard that is confused in the bulería with the fringes of the Manila shawl. In that warp between hair and textile there is a new biological dimension,

assembly , which La Molina is breathing into the flamenco body. In the

, with the collaboration of Sílvia Pérez Cruz, brought her own pregnancy to the stage, those nine months of gestation that wanted to leave the old biopolitics of patriarchy and give birth to a creature that would appear in a new world.

A world that Rocío has given birth to and that I would like to see as a new world for flamenco.

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