El exceso y el vacío. Nos habla de nosotros

‘Por el decir de la gente’
Dance, choreography, artistic and musical directing: Rocío Molina. Cante: David Lagos, Falo, Jesús Mendez, La Tremendita. Bass: Luis Escribano. Percussion: El Negro. Gaita del Gastor: Salvador Bocanegra: Caracola: Cayetano Granados. Idea: José Luis Ortiz Nuevo y Rocío Molina. Attendance: Less than half full.

’Por los caminos que se van’
Cante: Miguel Poveda. Guitar: Juan Carlos Romero. Percussion: Paquito González. Palmas: Carlos Grilo, Luis Cantarote. Reciting: Fernando Gª Rimada. Attendance: Full.

Juan Vergillos
photos: Málaga en Flamenco

Excess and emptiness. To give everything and be left with nothing. To dance in bare bones, sing with the skeleton of cante, the voice. Rocío Molina in an exercise in nudity. The search for tonal mystery. Lorca said the guitar Westernized flamenco. So the East is Molina…Málaga: the pure skeleton, the naked voice of a romance, of toná, a pregón. The man, the woman, in the middle of the crushing nothingness of existence. The luxuriant decadence of the vacuum. The Amazon desert. The Amazon is Rocío and Rosario (La Tremenda): in lonliness, seeking each other out like threats. In the lonliness of a scene which is pregnant with audience (from the photo-op with politicians, even the photographer’s movements at the morning press conference). Rocío and Rosario are mother and daughter in the romance of the nun. “My mother made me get married when I was young and brown”. And the metallic voice, ambiguous, of Falo, finding paths to heaven, new roads to nothingness. Good lord what a strange thing. I know it’s what Rocío was aiming for, because I can’t, I don’t want to rationalize her proposal, but I know Poveda got hung up along the way. He didn’t come up with what was announced: a new approach, a show based on the poetry of Muñoz Rojas, and left it at three traditional cantes with verse from the Málaga poet. The rest, business as usual. What Miguel Poveda always does, which is considerable as we all know.

Rocío Molina

Rocío Molina

Rocío Molina

Rocío Molina

And as far as the rest, nothing. The big nothing, emptiness. Rocío. As young as she is, she knows that under the flesh is the bone, and the marrow is on the inside. In her arms, her wrists, her fingers, are many lives. Many women. Nuns and women forced into marriage. Rocío is the whole history of flamenco dance, of popular, Hispanic, feminine dance. And that capacity for stylization. The setting, the Colegiata de Santa María, was not up to par. The show needed light and it needed sound. In other words, a theater space. Or the open air of the Torcal, for which it was conceived, though, for reasons unknown to me, it could not be. The thing is, this concert, conceived as one of the “seven wonders” (the name of the series withing the program), changed from the Torcal to the Colegiata in a question of mere hours. Even the presentation of the show itself was in doubt for a few days. The everyday sun, the emptiness of stone, it was the perfect venue, while the lack of concentration of the church subtracted strength. Rocío knew this and charged on ahead. It’s to her credit.

Miguel Poveda

Miguel Poveda

Miguel Poveda

Miguel Poveda

Miguel Poveda / Juan Carlos Romero

You need technical excess to create emptiness. Tomorrow it will be enough to sit on the stairway with crossed arms. What Rocío plants, eventually matures and flowers. For this reaon, the show does not end after sixty minutes. But what wonderful sixty minutes: what hands, eyes, head. Now she’s flesh, now ice. She is a dancer in constant flux and metamorphosis. I don’t mean the space between one piece and another, but between movements: in a thousandth of a second. In Rocío’s hands, all possibilities are intact and full. Exact, fulfilled. She is the measure of our best dreams, the ones that keep following us even after we are awake. I brush them away with a swipe of the hand, although I know full well that that is the existence of others, when I open my eyes, a strange vision. Rocío’s art is of dreams because she speaks about us. She is, like the sun that illuminates each day, an existential messenger.

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Special MÁLAGA EN FLAMENCO