Festival review: Caída Del Cielo (Fallen from Heaven)
Flamenco star Rocío Molina balanced controlled fury and balletic poise in an innovative celebration of the form’s history and possibilities.
Rocío Molina’s flamenco dancing has been described in extravagant terms such as glorious, intense, and wild. If all these reflect a sense of awe, it’s with good reason. Her Caída Del Cielo (Fallen from Heaven) is astonishing.
The show is a challenging and immensely rewarding work that can readily be set apart from traditional flamenco, while still clearly embracing the form. A review of a flamenco performance might typically and justly employ descriptions such as ‘passionate’ and ‘fiery’, but one must also consider the sheer gusto of Molina’s physicality in this case and the special breadth of individual expression that she brings to it. She has been described as a restless and risk-taking performer.
Now widely regarded as a Spanish art, flamenco blends several cultural inputs. It has its roots in northern India centuries ago and travelled through the Middle East, incorporating Moorish elements along the way until arriving in Andalucia. Whatever its origins, we know it can be complex and enthralling. Molina builds on that and makes it her own. Much awarded, she takes flamenco one large and dazzling step further on from traditional dance (pun intended).
Caída Del Cielo (Fallen from Heaven) presents a series of sometimes startling segments in character, a journey with different perspectives on womanhood. The variety of approaches underlines her innovation in modernising a staple dance form. Molina’s choreography can be subversive, incorporating humour and the surreal, and augmented with on-stage changes of costume (all designs by Cecilia Molano). The segment on patriarchal attitudes is one example that manages to be acidic and yet playful.
There is a strong dialogue between Molina’s movements and the accompanying musicians with call and response. Not surprisingly, percussion is often emphatic, setting a frame with clapping, cajón, sticks, and a wooden pole for Molina’s busy heels and finger-clicking. This is underlined at times in the performance with a rock-band drum kit, supplemented with an electric guitar and bass.
Oscar Lago provides brilliant guitar playing, both acoustic and electric. Other band members are Kiko Peña (vocals, electric bass, percussion), José Manuel Ramos (percussion) and Pablo Martin Jones (percussion, electronics). The band was exemplary, though it could tend to mask the sound of Molina’s shoes in some places towards the end. A distinctive contribution is Valentín Donaire’s lighting.
There’s no doubt about Molina’s underlying skill and personal flair. She is by turns explosively athletic, sinuous, slow and graceful. In the train of ruffles and pleats of a white Andalusian flamenco dress, she seems to float, then strut one minute, and melt to the floor the next.
Her ability to pump out high-speed staccato footwork is especially impressive when her feet are in a controlled fury while her torso is largely still and her arms and hands slide in a contrasting slow, balletic motion.
Molina admits that no flamenco is pure because it is impossible to have an exact standard and, moreover, that her own dancing is intentionally a matter of personal expression. She argues that emotion and music are essentially entwined with the body, its movement being a language that marries the two.
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It is evident how much attention she pays to this when even a gradual scrape of the sole of a shoe or the roll of a wrist can be lyrical and commanding, casting a spell on an audience. She can also work space with her body as if understanding gravities we cannot know, but simply watch in awe.
As the program notes suggest, the show is about “the willingness of the body exposed to the risk beyond the limits”. It is theatrical and hypnotic; a sensational ode to women and their lives that is articulated with strength, elegance and precision, often in unexpected ways.
Caída Del Cielo (Fallen from Heaven) reminds us what the best art should do, waking us to the best possibilities of human expression. The long, standing ovation at the end was well deserved.
Caída Del Cielo (Fallen from Heaven) ran at Her Majesty’s Theatre from February 28 to March 3 as part of Adelaide Festival. This is a review of opening night on February 28.
Read more 2025 Adelaide Festival coverage here on InReview