Alain Buffard

In 1998, Alain Buffard returned to the stage with his creation 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 medicines – 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 resistance of his physical and subjective montages against the statement that designates him as an obedient subject.