Alain Buffard

Re-creation by Matthieu Doze and Christophe Ives (2023)

How can a community be built from a solitude? How can we deploy the inflections of a shared language and build the horizon of a collective event from an idiom invented by one person? In 2005, in the wake of the piece Good for..., Alain Buffard revisits his work on the figure of Good Boy to broaden its scope and multiply its singularities. A choreographic fugue whose dancers – male and female – embody counterpoints, Mauvais genre, brings to life a landscape of contrasts and echoes, an architectonic of bodies in space between which the gaze circulates, measuring distances, repetitions, and the specific modes of appropriation of this material. The tools created for this solo are redistributed along new fault lines, wrenched from their original matrix to be recalibrated, made porous to other aesthetic and political endeavors. Far from being an army of clones, the group brings forth an archipelago of solitudes: each dancer makes the objects of Good Boy their own, from their own thought patterns, metabolizes them and circulates them in an infinite movement of exploration and transmission.

Alain Buffard was trained by Alwin Nikolais; American choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Anna Halprin were also decisive influences in his life. Buffard worked for Daniel Larrieu and Régine Chopinot and he choreographed Good Boy in 1998, a radical manifest-solo. The work of Alain Buffard constantly evolves and exposes recurring issues: after a long reflection on art, the body and gender, Buffard started diverging from the prescribed path and proposing pieces that interrogate how the body becomes the locus and main stake of political questions in dance. His last piece, Baron samedi, was created in the Théâtre de Nîmes on April 24-25 2012.