Good Boy
Alain Buffard
In 2023, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting the Ménagerie de verre for the staging of Good Boy by Alain Buffard, as part of the 2023 Les Inaccoutumés Festival.
“The body as a reservoir of worlds – spaces, modes of existence, flows, mutations, transformations.
Shunning the notion of a dancer’s body-cum-tool, Good Boy fiddles with the idea of a body-cum-apparatus, the body as a special instrument that serves to exacerbate a certain form of transgression; a body that reveals the social and moral glut, a body that speaks vitality and sickness.
The body’s capabilities extend beyond our knowledge. So why not remake the body from scratch, invent a new geography of joints, devise a new anatomical syntax? Explore its surface like a field of disparate and independent segments, arrange links among appendages, portray prolongations and offshoots. Shift the original functions. Repeat everyday gestures to invent imaginary impediments. Erase the contours of identity to better sketch in new ones. Manufacture a useless body – a body as art, eschewing any notion of functionality – to achieve a new status.”
Text © Alain Buffard
Photo: © Philippe Lucchese
About the artist
Alain Buffard
Alain Buffard (1960-2013), heir to and dancer of great figures of the 80s, saw the arrival of the AIDS battle as a major event. Resisting the disease, combining his own story with personal myths, he has explored various issues of his epoch through his pieces, expositions, and films. His works, from
Good Boy to Baron Samedi, with their radicalism and profound interrogations have contributed to the renewal of the French theatrical scene.
Photo: © Isabelle Meister
