Black method is the new play by Javier Martín, Spanish choreographer, dancer, and researcher, whose career path constitutes a firm bet on the development of new corporal languages. Expressionist echoes emanate from this performance in which the dancer travels for an hour around different physical states and qualities of movement whilst getting familiar with objects and symbolic acts. These are being spread out step by step in a constructed space in front of the audience.

Black method revolves around the ideas of presence and absence, of the individual and the multitude, time, and how to overcome formal structures which go through our cultural system, all to conform to our new sensitivities.

The piece confines itself to the movement of arts, placed somewhere between performance, installation, contemporary action, dance, and research processes. In the words of Javier Martín: “Choreography meets with “the other” in a trial of strength between the real and its double. It is an exercise that hopes to overcome absence. ‘The other half you do not see, the void that the shining light comes from’. By dancing it, you do not unravel the presence of the form, for the movement happens through the disappearance of the form. You overcome the absence, an imperceptible becoming.”

The artistic proposal identifies and works critically with some of the systems adopted by the contemporary science, and the general popular culture of body and movement, what Javier Martin calls performative metaphors (they can also be techniques). Without forgetting them, the Black Method works from its verification to signal how, in its repetition, such metaphors or techniques eventually become inertial.

The proposal of the Black Method consists in distilling what accumulates inertia in our bodies. This way we seek to reflect on, and attack new practices and methods that consider, as a point of origin, its disappearance. It is the development of a mature art form that considers and contemplates its own disappearance.”