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.

Source: programme of the CND

Alain Buffard starts dancing in 1978 with Alwin Nikolaïs at the Centre national de danse contemporaine in Angers. He dances in several productions from Brigitte Farges and Daniel Larrieu, as well as Régine Chopinot, Philippe Decouflé. He realizes a choreography for two plays with Marie-Christine Georghiu, accompanied by the Rita Mitsuko rock group, a first solo "Bleu nuit" in 1988, and Wagner's Master singers of Nuremberg staged by Claude Régy in 1989.

While carrying on his career of dancer, he works as an assistant in Anne de Villepoix 's Gallery for exhibitions on R. Zaugg, Fischli & Weiss, Chris Burden and V. Acconci. At the same time, he is a correspondent for two Norwegian daily papers, for which he covers visual arts events in France. He stops dancing between 1991 and 1996. In 1996 he makes two decisive meetings : one with Yvonne Rainer on the occasion of the updating of her play Continuous Project ­ Altered Daily by the Albrecht KNUST Quatuor, and another one with Anna Haplrin, with whom he is working as the winner of the "Villa Medicis - hors les murs" prize.

In January 1998 he creates "Good boy", his second solo, and then makes in 1999 two trios INtime / EXtime and MORE et encore. "Tout va bien" is premiered in June 2010 at Festival Montpellier Danse and his last piece "Baron Samedi" is created in April 2012 at the Théâtre de Nîmes where he was an associated artist for both seasons 2010-2011 and 2011-2012.

He also realized "My lunch with Anna", a film with Anna Halprin in California with the help of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in France and le Fresnoy national studio for contemporary arts, where he was associated artist during the season 2004-2005.

Source: Alain Buffard 's website

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).