She has danced pregnant, in bondage gear, and drenched in what looks like menstrual blood – all to unleash the monsters lurking within her and all of us. We meet the unstoppable performer rocking the flamenco world

‘Since I was little, I’ve always been told that I am the weird one,” says Rocío Molina. “Like an alien,” she adds, speaking through a translator over video call from Spain. Weird in the world of flamenco, she means, where Molina is, at 39, now one of the art form’s major international stars.

She started dancing aged three in Málaga. “I was different physically,” she says. “I wasn’t tall. I wasn’t slim. I wasn’t flamenca enough, you know? I didn’t have a Gypsy face.” But even as a child she decided she didn’t care about that, and put all her focus into dance. “For me it was difficult to live in the world the way it was presented to me. And dancing was a way to escape. I felt like I was running away constantly, and my way of doing that was through dance.”

When she first went moshing, Rachel Ní Bhraonáin couldn’t stop giggling. Now she has made a dance show about the ‘gorgeous community’ she encountered

Walking into a basement club in Camden, the sound of the guitar hits you in the gut, along with the singer’s full-throated, death-metal growl. In the middle of the crowd is a circle of thrashing bodies, hair flying, limbs everywhere, bouncing off each other. The mosh pit. “I got flung about five feet earlier tonight but people pick you back up,” one of them, Jake, tells me. “It’s a good way to get out the stress of the week.”

“Friendly violence,” is how gig-goers James and Angelina describe the energy of the pit. “Achy feet, chafing, people’s sweat dripping from the ceiling,” adds their friend Sam wryly. “It’s not altogether pleasant, but it’s just what you’re compelled to do when you hear the music.”

Mosh is at Epic Studios, Norwich, 23-25 May. Norfolk & Norwich festival runs until 26 May.