La Biennale di Venezia will present the Silver Lion to the Spanish bailaora and choreographer Rocío Molina.
Wayne McGregor writes in his motivation for the award: “Molina’s avant-garde, extravagant and powerfully raw choreographies fuse traditional flamenco with modern dance styles and impulsos – improvisations that characterise her unique dance language. Indeed, Molina has coined her own artistic language based on a recalibrated traditional flamenco style which respects its essence but embraces the genuinely new. Radically free, Molina combines in her works: technical virtuosity, contemporary research, and conceptual risk. Unafraid to forge alliances with other disciplines and artists, her choreographies are unique scenic events based on ideas and cultural forms ranging from cinema to literature, including philosophy and painting. …Molina weaves a 21st Century dialogue with the past to reinvent a fresh future for the form – speaking directly to the now in honest and evocative terms. She seems to tear though the classical ‘rule’ book to construct her own volumes, inspiring and moving us to look and feel anew”.
McGregor concludes: “Rocío Molina can’t help but be boundary-less – in ideas, partnerships and impressively in her dancing itself. Morphing between the feral, the sensuous, the upright, the parallel, the violent, the tender – in an astonishing explosion of physical and creative energy. Rocío Molina is a force to be reckoned with, in art and in life”.
