Chronic on dance of Rocio Molina
We went to the Trocadero, in Chaillot, this Wednesday, November 24, 2021, with some uncertainty, because the program carried this surprising mention of a one-hour intermission. Was this a mistake, some said? Rocio Molina, the flamenco dancer-choreographer, in proposing this, certainly had our confidence in her ability to hold the attention, the pleasure, the taste of the greatest number of people in the usual time, which is cut by about twenty minutes. But one hour was a requirement of which we did not know the necessity.
She whose dance was, a few years ago, charged with grace and eroticism even when her pregnancy was well advanced, is now returned to her full slenderness and flexibility. Opening this new page, she slowly begins to draw us into her very particular dance, where virtuosity alternates in bursts with moments of grace, and with those where she gathers herself, and also those where she escapes and breaks. In this exact alternance, our breath follows her as she settles on the large stage where we are waiting for her, in white at first, and makes it her own, tastes it, traverses it. Her proximity with the guitar, the man and the instrument, resembles a caress, indeed she takes it and caresses it. She answers it, twists in its chords, speaks to it whith her feet, that play of the ground in constant notes, strung in lively repeated sentences, whispering at first then little by little by jerks, imposing her voice, her body, her gesture.
And we walk with her in this text and in the arc of her arms, and the one of her loins arching her waist like a toreador who completes his pass and catches his breath before returning towards the stunned beast. The guitar plays, the man speaks to her while distilling his honey, and we breathe too. When Inicio (Uno) ends, after an immense rolling up, which picks up the ground and its sheet to cover her entirely, giving to her gestures a new weight, a gravity, the question is dried up as for the waiting which follows. We are in Rocio's house, we stay there, we drink with her, we drink to her dance, we don't wait anymore, we are here.
When a long time later she comes back, all filled this time with black and as if placed on a dark lake that shines and reflects her, it doesn't even seem long, we come back too. We had not left her universe. So now it is black, a black that shines on the ground, that glows in his dress, that follows his arms and then his fingers which sometimes spread out like a bird's wing to the exact rhythm of the notes, or like a comma which scans the score. This black soon extends into a huge hat, one of those called a cape, that is said to be feminine but whose air is also religious, that stops with a stroke the shape of a body giving it a sudden majesty, like the frame of a painting or the altar of an offering. Al fondo Riela (La Otro del Uno) begins, and we are immediately drawn into it. And there the surprise sets in. That of the beauty and grace, of the blue light that digs into it, of the arms that reach out to the sky of this music, which now flows from two guitars, from two men who look at each other while playing and watch her playing their sound.
Don't be mistaken: she refuses to install us in the grace, she refuses that the moment of beauty settles, she breaks it and takes us elsewhere, at once, on another partition. You never have time to contemplate beauty, only to seize it in its fulgurance before it cuts itself and cuts us. Imagine that the emotion at certain moments is such that it must be written as you go along. And then, always these steps, these heels which slam more and more quickly, and carry us in their text, with a virtuosity which we forget by moment so much it speaks to us and says to us. We don't always come back. One does not come back.
Thus, this second part that some of us did not wait for, the hour having had reason of them without them knowing to what it prepared, it prepared us. Because this gathering will have been right, it will have been right of us and right of everything. Rocio Molina creates a universe, really. Certainly like any great artist whose writing is woven before our eyes when we have the chance to follow him and wait for him. But this one, O how singular, is of those that one does not forget.