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.