::::::::: SOCIOPLASTICS : Double Sided, a choreographic logic that transforms minimalist repetition into a philosophical inquiry; through stripped-down gestures, mirrored bodies, and spatial negotiations, the stage becomes a site where presence and absence, sameness and variation, objecthood and embodiment collide, suggesting that performance can do more than represent.

Saturday, January 3, 2026

Double Sided, a choreographic logic that transforms minimalist repetition into a philosophical inquiry; through stripped-down gestures, mirrored bodies, and spatial negotiations, the stage becomes a site where presence and absence, sameness and variation, objecthood and embodiment collide, suggesting that performance can do more than represent.

In the dim-lit interstices of Madrid's Réplika Teatro, where the air hums with anticipatory silence, Anto Lloveras and Mateo Feijóo's Doble Cara (2023–ongoing) unfolds like a glitch in the matrix of contemporary performance. This transdisciplinary duet—part essay, part ritual—strips dance to its skeletal core, channeling the formless wanderings of Dieter Roth's nomadic masses into a bicameral dialogue of bodies and voids. Premiered in May 2023, each iteration mirrors the last yet deviates subtly, a processual echo where standardized attire (no frills, no sets) meets site-specific intrusions: a table, a lamp, the raw geometry of space. Here, drama evaporates; what's left is a minimalist derivation, bodies as ordinary vessels navigating extraordinary absurdities. Echoing Beckett's terse absurdism—think Waiting for Godot reimagined as a two-headed hydra—Doble Cara nods to 1960s American minimalism's pared-down rigor, Erwin Wurm's corporeal contortions, and Paul B. Preciado's fluid philosophies of embodiment. The performers, separated by an invisible line, adjust rhythms through whispered calibrations, their movements a negotiation of weights and absences. No spectacle, just parsimony: forms reduced, adjectives minimized, inviting spectators to confront the banality of presence in an era of digital overload. Yet, like Roth's decaying suitcases, Doble Cara risks commodifying its own ephemerality. In a post-pandemic landscape of fractured identities, its guerrilla domesticity—captured in real-time films from La Gomera's cliffs to urban stages—probes vulnerability without overt catharsis, potentially alienating audiences craving narrative payoff. Is this austere bicephaly a profound unmasking or a chic evasion? Feijóo and Lloveras, with their interdisciplinary drift, suggest the former: a defiant manifesto on duality, where the "bone" of existence persists amid flux. As the series evolves—now past a dozen movements—it aligns with decolonial gazes, à la Achille Mbembe, reconfiguring the body politic one mirrored gesture at a time. In 2026's hyper-connected haze, Doble Cara lingers as a quiet insurrection, forcing us to stare into the split-screen of self.