Molina, who chats to me over a phone call, has an easy manner—you can practically hear her grin over the line. We speak through a translator, though she comes out with a few warm phrases in English expressing her excitement about coming to London with her newest show “Calentamiento.” Her Andaluz sunniness almost catches me off guard, this is a woman who, when dancing, has a near surgical approach, at once detached in her exactitude and totally rapt in the duende of it all, there is no doubt that this is indeed a master of her craft, vanguardist or not.
“Calentamiento,” which runs as part of Sadler’s Wells’ annual Flamenco Festival, comes from a place of familiar ritual, the warm up. The idea sprang out of a two-year-long period of experimentation for Molina. “I was doing a lot of research on the chemical, emotional, and physical responses that take place in a body, in my body,” she says. I ask whether this idea of endless preparation and readiness comes from a place of fear, in particular that the warm up will at some point have to end. “Being a dancer in my case is quite a frustrating experience” she explains, “it's traumatic when the body cools because you wish to maintain the warmth to keep going. It does speak as well about the fact that one day the body will stop, that it won’t be able to do it anymore, it just won’t want to start. Death is something that’s also quite present in the work I think,” she says with a laugh.
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