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Good Boy
The body as a reservoir of worlds, – of spaces, of modes of existence, of fluxes,
of mutations, of transformations.
Opposed to the body-tool of the dancer, good boy plays around with the idea of a
body-apparatus, a favoured instrument-body by which is heightened and exacerbated
a certain form of transgression ; a body that reveals the social and moral glut,
a body that speaks vitality and sickness.
We don’t know of what the body is capable. Why not start from zero with the body,
invent a new articular geography, invent another organic grammar. explore its
surface like a field of heterogeneous and independent segments, organize
relationships between masses, draw it prolongations into the space, excrescences
and growths. Transfer the original functions. Repeat everyday gestures to give it
imaginary hindrances.
Erase the identifitary contours to better sketch in others. Manufacture a useless
body to enwrap it in a new status, embrace a new stature, and shatter the
aesthetic of the sculptural ideal inherited from J.J. Winckelmann.
Alain Buffard
Paris, November 9th, 1997
translated from the original French by David Vaughn
In 1998, Alain Buffard returned to the stage with his production Good Boy, a choreographic self-portrait that is a bit like a blank canvas. Rather than a solo, it’s more about the invention of solitude, its meticulous development as a mental and physical terrain, a zone for exhibiting and redefining oneself via the margins: merely a presence on stage, defining the outlines of one’s being through repeated actions, positioning one’s body as affirmation and uncertainty, a sensual and fictional field of exploration. A solo of disintegration and reconstruction, Good Boy creates a grammar of rebelliousness, reviewing the strategies of invention that make it possible to rebuild a body in the face of disease, social constraints and gender assignment. With just a few accessories – underpants, sellotape, boxes of medicine – which he uses to ‘draw extensions, excrescences for himself’, he creates an aesthetic of the minimal, of insistance and repetition. Revived by Matthieu Doze, this ‘good boy’ continues to act – setting the resist- ance of his physical and subjective montages against the statement that designates him as an obedient subject.
