Not to be missed. Why Heating It’s one of those montages that you remember for years or, perhaps, for a lifetime. For many reasons: Rocío Molina, dancer and choreographer of the show, the main one. And for example what happened at the end of the premiere of the show this Saturday at the Matadero Dance Center in Madrid, which in reality has no end because the dancer continues to walk in heels, already with the lights on, while the audience understands that she has to leave.
But the audience, all standing and applauding, remained anchored to their seats as if it were not possible to leave the place where those two hours of pure talent and spectacle had passed, much less leave its protagonist there, on stage, still clicking his heels. Then, when the room finally cleared and the spectators left their seats and headed towards the exit, with the stage and Molina on the right, director Pedro Almodóvar stood in front, knelt down and held out his hands. Molina, with an excited expression, continued to do his thing as if in a stage trance between tiredness and fullness. Almodóvar stood up after a few seconds, also overwhelmed by the two hours of theater performance he had experienced, and blew her a kiss. The dancer, without stopping hitting that platform that she has been doing since she was 7 and which she had explained at the beginning of the show, smiled shyly. The end of Heating It seemed like a pilgrimage and Rocío Molina was a figure that seemed impossible not to venerate as she passed by.
In 2010, after showing his show old gold at the New York City Center, dance star Mikhail Baryshnikov also knelt before Rocío Molina backstage. Almodóvar, certainly aware of this anecdote, chose to pay homage right there, where the stage fascination had occurred and in front of the spectators who left the room.
In Heating So many things happen, some almost unheard of, that it’s not easy to tackle an analysis without putting effort into it spoilers. Of course, the event that overshadows everything is the dedication and clairvoyance of an artist who has reached truly transcendental places of creation and interpretation. She discovers herself as a dancer who continues to investigate the bodily volumes of flamenco, but also as an actress, master of ceremonies and woman, in an exercise of extreme artistic demand and with an intelligent and measured result. At times, the dancer’s face seemed different and it was even difficult to recognize her in that state of total dedication that she shows and in which we notice that she is.
Although Molina had worked with the text before in other shows, it’s the first time he’s held on to the word from start to finish, as he dances and dances and dances, and makes jokes, with humor (“here I do a María Pagés, look at my arms”) and poetry (“I saw a woman come in with her lips painted red, a mouth that could devour itself”). And so the first 35 minutes of Heating and warm-up: with the dancer at the foot of the stage and light in the room, while she practices that foot plank that has accompanied her since she was a child and tells her method and anecdotes with the microphone in her hand without stopping clicking her heels. “If at any time it seems too long, you can safely leave. Where’s the girl in the red coat?”
Responsible for these texts and for the co-direction of the show is Pablo Messiez, an Argentine author and director who has already demonstrated on many occasions his knowledge of working with dance and the exquisite practice that he usually intertwines with movement. The sum of their beliefs together with that of the Cabosanroque collective in the scenography, of Roberto Martínez in the costumes and of Carlos Marquerie, who created truly acute and elegant lights, structures and supports a scenic apparatus in which everything adds up, everything counts, in a beauty that distances itself from crowded places to offer surprise and enchantment (those chairs that dance by themselves).
Special mention deserves the musical direction of Niño de Elche, who has composed an intimate and imminent flamenco mosaic, with the gypsy-rock of the seventies of the last century as its sourdough. Las Grecas’ music runs through the show in several ways. There is a very lucid containment in what could become a shot. But the importance of the minimum, when it is full of meaning, is fundamental and successful. Musically and in the overall performance of the show. The four fabulous singers (and actresses) who appear and disappear in a luminous and musical scenic device, complete and condense with their presence and their voices, that dramatic coherence that runs through Heating.
On a corporeal level, Molina explores new twists and turns in that flamenco that weaves and kneads from the deepest knowledge and the most authoritative freedom. And visit different corners where you can appreciate the legacy of Bob Fosse and American cabaret and even Loie Fuller and his Serpentine dance. Even the metal chairs, present throughout the two hours (with a stellar performance in some moments and an overwhelming image in the final scene), seem to pay homage to the history of dance and recall, like subtle flashes, without insistence (another success), mythical scenes of choreographies such as ROSE DANST ROSE by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker e Café Müller by Pina Bausch.
Rocío Molina says she doesn’t want the party to end, “if I don’t stop starting it means it won’t end”, and this statement reaches its climax towards the end, when the dancer switches to techno with an (unusual) surprise included.
The warm-up can be seen at the Matadero Dance Center until next Sunday, November 23rd. If you go to see it (when you go to see it), bring a red flower with you. I can count this far.
