Alain Buffard

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, boxesof 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.

Alain Buffard’s place in French choreography is that of a free spirit whose productions do not fit into the pre-established categories; after initially performing in the 1980s for Régine Chopinot, Daniel Larrieu and Brigitte Farges, among others, in the late 1990s up until his death in 2013 he produced a body of work that was imbued with vital urgency in which each gesture had a transgressive power, questioning what a body can be. It was also an incubator, drawing on multiple influences – from American postmodern dance, the visual arts and performance – that helped to expand the field of dance and the historical resonance of his practice. His encounter with Yvonne Rainer and Anna Halprin in the 1990s, and his discovery of work by artists such as Vito Acconci, Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman, fed into this field of aesthetic and discursive problematics, which had hitherto had little impact on him.