Mauvais Genre

How do we tackle an autobiographical type piece – Good Boy – to unfold more generic stories, such was the gamble with Good for…, a piece for four dancers. Such is the challenge today with Mauvais Genre. A new version, but now intended for twenty to thirty people, a majority of whom is engaged otherwise in their own creative streams. The solo bears a strange infinitude: although it has indeed a greater capacity to expose the body than any other form, it seems, at the same time, inseparable from its interpreter. A different body, bodies different: can we still say this is the same solo? I wished to see what the outcome would be, transposed to other bodies, each one bearing its individual history, of the propositions of this first piece of work.

If Good Boy meddles with ill-health and the fragility of our body, it really is a matter of exposition of a singular body whose strata inspire and perspire its own history. But for all that, we do not deal here with autobiography in disguise, even less demultiplied biographies. While making use of the differences in each person, Good for… shifts the political and social stakes of the initial solo to the question of community with its tricky figuration. To demultiply presences produces as many trails to represent the choreographical and social stakes of Good Boy. Nonetheless, it is less of a joint com- munity which appears, reconciled or not, than a demultiplication of the singularities.

The presences of Matthieu Doze, Rachid Ouramdane and Christian Rizzo in the second step trapped the solo device, in that they disfigured each of the sequences which constituted the initial material. Something of the identification of the dancer to the solo and of the solo to the dancer becomes thus impeded. A particular experience can see the surge of much ado. Good Boy dared at the tragic, there will have been substituted to it unintentionally a playful, ironic, and at the least amused parti pris. One may say that we go from the I-body to the play-body. The necessity of the counterpoint produced by each one having inclined the whole of the project towards an amused complicity.

During our first presentation of Good for… at the Crestet – art center –, we established a specific plasticity and elasticity relation, due to the architecture of the place. The L shaped space of the exhibition galleries where we danced and the bay windows, or the show windows rather, which separated us from the public standing in the square garden reinforced the distance and the separation between the audience and the performers, thus compelling him/her to assume the choice he/she had made of looking at this or that one amongst us. The space permitted to play with the visible and the non-visible, a demultiplication and a reduction of our presences. This device within the White Cube equally favored a certain distanciation of the treated object. We exhibited this proposition at the Dijon auditorium – a very large theater –, and we noticed the great diversity of readings that could be made thanks to this new architectural space, very different indeed from the previous one. Although it was not premeditated, there occurred a return to the tragic which belonged to the first version.

With Mauvais Genre the number of people will necessarily have as an effect to unfold and demultiply the tension lines of the initial solo; but the challenge for me is also to work from the possible site’s architectonics where the piece will be performed so as to weave other reading patterns, to multiply the looks upon this story. To explore other possibles in the performing spaces in which we produce ourselves supposes work ahead. It obliges us to think over the components of the original piece as a new step, to better unprime what was built during the previous one. I could also say that an artist is making the same piece over again, I here assume and claim this sweet and slow job of scrubbing, crossing out, return and aftermaths which maybe all tell of the same obsession, but do not hinder alteration and variations.

With Mauvais Genre, the challenge is different yet since we are good girls and good boys united. We are emphasizing the sound production of our bodies: splashes and booms. And also the capacity for each one to make himself/herself porous to their own feminity and their own masculinity: high heels for the boys yes, but no falbalas, y-fronts for the girls yes, but with no frills. Mauvais Genre could have been titled Vice and Versa.

The good boys became bad girls, and reciprocally.

The good girls go to paradise, the bad go everywhere.

And make no fuss.

Alain Buffard [November 2002]