Teatro alle Tese, Venice Silver Lion winner Rocío Molina unleashes raw energy, while Golden Lion winner Saburo Teshigawara turns his gaze inward, at Wayne McGregor’s Venice Dance Biennale

A woman in a pink tulle dress stands at the back of a wooden stage, covered with lime dust. Slowly, deliberately, she walks forward and bends her body over a chair, carefully arranging her frock as she executes a lingering forward roll. Over and over again she repeats the action, her feet crashing to the floor the only sound as she curls up like a powder puff.

That is the opening of Carnación, the Spanish dancer and choreographer Rocío Molina’s extraordinary exploration of desire, sacred and profane, painful and tender. The piece matches its subject, full of raw energy and passion. Yet at the same time it’s a cleverly formed work, delicate in execution, complex in the feelings it evokes.

Created specially for the Venice Dance Biennale – curated by choreographer Wayne McGregor under the banner Boundary-less – it fits beautifully into a city full of art, conjuring the spirit of Zurbarán, Velázquez and Goya. Serendipitously, walking round the city, I’d been looking at dark pietàs of the suffering Christ by Bellini and Paula Rego’s unsettling fantasies of violent oppression. Both seemed to illuminate Molina’s choreography, yet her courageous imagination is entirely her own.

Working with an astonishing group of musicians, including the singer Niño de Elche, who is effectively her dance partner, she creates a series of dreamlike images. At one moment, she emerges from a deep red dress to be held upside down, naked except for a body stocking, like the woman in Max Ernst’s The Antipope; at another, De Elche holds her plait in his mouth, still singing as she stamps and dances away from him. She dances intricate, ferocious flamenco to the baroque strains of Maureen Choi’s violin and binds her own body with rope in subjugation as a choir sings a Stabat Mater.

Molina, 38, is the recipient of this year’s Silver Lion, traditionally awarded to young talent. You feel the energy of her thought and invention sweeping her into the future. The winner of the Golden Lion is Saburo Teshigawara, 68-year-old master, a choreographer of distinction and pioneering individuality.

His version of Stravinsky’s puppet story Petrushka is a characteristically rigorous examination of what it means to be human and what it means to wear a mask. Using an uncomfortably mashed-up version of Stravinsky’s groundbreaking score, his heartbroken puppet is trapped in a shadowy world where shafts of light offer illusory options of escape.

Teshigawara, who designed the lighting himself, flits through the shadows, astonishingly supple and speedy and unbelievably expressive. At points, he pushes his head against the wall, a pencil-like figure battling his destiny; at others, he dances in jerky movements with Rihoko Sato as a series of doll-like characters, whose costume changes seem to reflect Petrushka’s mood.

It’s a tantalisingly beautiful piece but curiously inward-looking, contemplative rather than engaging. It’s as if Teshigawara is on a journey to the centre of his own creativity, but he doesn’t always carry the audience with him.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible not to admire. In his speech accepting the honour of the Golden Lion, he exhorted the members of the Biennale’s dance college, made up of young pre-professional dancers from all over the world, to “be brave enough to be yourself”. It’s a slogan both he and Molina live by.

Star ratings (out of five) Carnación ★★★★★ Petrushka ★★★