By Steve Dow
As a child living with her family in Granada in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Andalusia, Sydney-based dance artist and choreographer Pepa Molina fell for flamenco.
Her beloved maternal grandmother, Encarnacion, taught her various Spanish steps in the family kitchen, while a wine-bearing uncle sang and clapped along.
Pepa Molina is one of Australia’s foremost flamenco dancers.Credit: Jessica Hromas
“I’d be there, dancing, but I didn’t know what I was doing,” she laughs now, from the middle of rehearsals for her new dance work Perceptions, which opens at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatres this week. “That’s how it started.”
Molina was born in Sydney, where her Andalusian parents migrated for work, but for a chunk of her early childhood the family returned to Granada.
While her mother, a seamstress, wanted to stay in Spain, her father, who worked in construction, decided the pay was better in Sydney and the family resettled permanently in Randwick and later Hurlstone Park.
It wasn’t until Molina was in her 20s, in 1993, that she would fully realise her dancing ambitions by going back to Spain, where she lived for 20 years.
There she learned the “Granada flavour” of flamenco dancing in the caves at Sacromonte, where a large group of Roma had lived since the 15th century, opposite the famous Islamic palace and fortress known as the Alhambra.
Later, Molina taught dance at the Amor de Dios flamenco centre in Madrid, before finally moving home to Sydney in 2013, where she gave birth to a daughter, and settled in Lidcombe. She still returns to Spain annually to run dance workshops.
Her latest show grew out of a two-month program that she conducted in 2018 at Residential Gardens (or Parque Habitacional) in Sydney’s Rooty Hill, Australia’s only Spanish-speaking nursing home.
The residents, hailing from Spain, the Philippines, and South and Central America, had shared their memories of childhood and traditions with the artist. They then dressed up and took part in a performance. “They really felt they were living it,” says Molina.
Perceptions grew from a program at a Sydney nursing home.Credit: Joshua Morris
The premiere of this new iteration of Perceptions, delayed for three years due to the pandemic, is directed, co-choreographed and co-performed by Jesus Fernandez, a flamenco dancer born in Cadiz, a city in southwestern Spain. It will be his first visit to Australia.
Molina and Fernandez have collaborated with each other for two decades. “We know each other inside out; he’s the flamenco dancer I’ve shared the stage with the most. I just feel so comfortable with him.”
In the show, Molina is exploring intricacies, superstitions and cliches in flamenco’s past and present. For the first of four vignettes, Molina will wear a heavy, hand-embroidered yellow silk shawl while dancing.
“It weighs a ton,” she says, smiling. “I did that on purpose because it’s the burden and the weight of tradition, you have that on your shoulders.”
Much superstition attends the wearing of yellow in this art form, reputedly because a flamenco singer died on stage in Madrid more than a century ago while wearing the colour.
The woman was singing a petenera: an old, slow style of singing and dancing infused with melancholic lyrics and itself the subject of superstition.
“I’ve heard of old-school flamenco singers and players who say, ‘If you’re going to dance that [petenera], I’m not going to go on stage after you’,” says Molina. “That’s how seriously you take it.”
Molina won’t be dancing a petenera, but she will wear yellow despite the protests of her superstitious mother. Her mother has a “super southern Spain mentality” and crosses herself before crossing the road, says Molina, and “has always told me to never wear yellow; not even on the street”.
Molina performs in her 2016 show, Bush Bailando.Credit: Heidrun Lohr
Molina, however, is in good company: over the past decade, many younger flamenco dancers have abandoned this fear, embracing the colour on stage once again.
She’s letting the audience decide why she’s wearing yellow, seeing her aesthetic as both performance and a form of visual art: “The way an audience can perceive flamenco, especially when there’s less understanding of it, really interests me.”
Perceptions is at Riverside Theatres from July 20 to 22.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.