Rocio Molina: Fallen from Heaven review – flamenco with a subversive twist

When Rocío Molina strikes a pose, her limbs snap to attention with military precision. And when she surveys her audience, the intensity of her gaze demands that we lock eyes with her expressive face. The young flamenco artist is a connoisseur of drama, famous for rocking the genre with vivid, theatrical concepts, such as the rock’n’roll riptide surging through her 2016 production Fallen from Heaven (Caída del Cielo). Recently staged for Sadler’s Wells’s annual flamenco festival, the work showcases the surefooted technique and barnstorming bravado that earned the Spanish performer this year’s Critics’ Circle National Dance award for outstanding female performance.

Under Molina’s lens, flamenco is a beast that can’t be tamed, only pacified. At times the dance courses through her like a current of rage she can’t quell; at others she wears it lightly, embellishing deep balletic pliés with tender pats to the thigh. The style’s usual hallmarks of passion and pride – piercing eye contact, a robust, upright posture – jostle for position with flashes of absurdity and jest. Like the title, with its twin connotations of the wicked and the virtuous, it’s a show of opposing forces. The dancer catapults herself one direction and is constantly drawn in another.

The production pivots on this image of a woman exploring different ways to exist and shine. A parade of costumes illuminates a femininity in flux: pearly white ruffles suggest brides and sea creatures, while a gold bolero conjures the oomph of bullfighters and ringmasters. Womanhood is a grisly albatross in one unsettling scene involving a sanguineous skirt. In another, naked sensuality evolves into actual nudity as Molina disrobes under a heavy moon.

A four-man band join the dancer on stage, revving up the showmanship with a clanging drum set and electric bass. José Manuel Ramos’s breakneck body percussion draws mercurial footwork from our star, including quickfire shuffles and sharp, cutting stamps. She courts her companions’ approval as often as she spurns it, upending flamenco’s characteristic synthesis of music and dance with offbeat flourishes: a mutinous wiggle here, a flurry of syncopated claps there. Technique is similarly flexible. Molina whittles and restyles her form so thoroughly that many segments look more like contemporary dance than flamenco.

The show is bookended by vibrant exhibitions of theatre, with a statuesque intro spun in silence and a head-banging finale that spills into the audience. The displays in between walk a shakier path, making pit stops for farcical, sometimes puzzling romps with broomsticks and crisps and BDSM gear. These scenes don’t want for pizzazz – whether it’s Michael Jackson-style crotch grabs or wrists twirled like curlicues – but they’re let down by their capricious phrasing.

Far sounder are the moments rooted in forthright sentiment. Early on, Molina swaps a fussy bata de cola skirt for stretchy toreador trousers, and more than once she keels over on to her knees – gleeful subversions of the flamenco tradition. Fallen from Heaven has its wandering moments, but this is no empty spectacle.