Good for...

The challenge with Good for…, a piece for four dancers, is how to reveal more generic stories from an autobiographical piece. The solo has the capacity to expose the body more than any other form, while at the same time seeming to be inseparable from the per- former. When the body, or bodies are different, can we truly say that it is the same solo? I wanted to see what the propositions of this first piece would be like, transposed onto other bodies that each have their own story. The presence of Matthieu Doze, Rachid Ouramdane and Christian Rizzo entraps the solo, in the way that they distort each sequence. Their presence prevents the way the dancer identifies with the solo and the solo with the dancer. Good Boy deals with illness and the fragility of our bodies, but, in fact, it is all about showing a singular body whose layers breathe and sweat its own story. It is not, however, an autobiography in dis- guise, and it is definitely not a pile of biographies together. Good for… takes each person’s differences and shifts the political and social issues of the initial solo toward the question of the community and how hard it is to depict. Multiplying the number of dancers present opens up so many avenues for the “re-presentation” of Good Boy’s choreographic and social questions. It shows, however, a range of singularities rather than an undivided community, whether reconciled or unreconciled.

A particular experiment can give rise to surprises. Good Boy bordered on the tragic, Good for… unintentionally replaced it with a fun, ironic approach. We could say that we went from the corps-je to the corps-jeu. The need for a counterpoint from each dancer tilted the whole project in the direction of amused kinship.

During our first performance at the Crestet art center, the venue’s architecture led us to establish a very specific visual and elastic rapport. The L-shaped space of the galleries where we were dancing, and the bay windows, or, more to the point, the windows that separated us from the audience standing in the square garden, rein- forced the distance and separation between the audience and the performers, forcing them to choose one dancer to watch and to own that choice. The space allowed for a play between the visible and the non-visible, for the multiplication and the reduction of our presences. Performing in a White Cube* also fostered a certain distance with the subject.

Exploring other possibilities in the spaces we performed in meant we had to work things out in advance. It forced us to rethink the components of the initial piece as a new phase, in order to better deactivate what was built during the previous one. We really emphasized the sounds our bodies produced, all the splashes and the booms. We also focused on each dancer’s capacity to access their feminine side, with heels but no frills (we remained in the White Cube*).

Good boys became bad boys and vice versa. Good boys go to heaven, bad boys go everywhere.
And make no fuss.
Alain Buffard

* “White Cube” is a term first coined by the art critic Brian O’Doherty in 1976, for an open white space with no pre-established signs.
It worked well with avant-gardist experiments and became an art gallery paradigm.