Theatre Journal

Created by French choreographer Alain Buffard, Mauvais Genre (Bad Type) presents itself as "a work of art about the fragility and vulnerability of the body." The body in question is multivalent: the HIV+ body (such as is Buffard's), the male body, the female body, the white body, the black body, the brown body, the naked body, the performing body, and, of course, the body of spectators to the work. A sequel to Buffard's 1998 solo, Good Boy, there is something eerie, captivating, irresistible, impossible, and, above all, transporting, about this postmodern dance. After the show, I found myself stumbling through the East Village streets "distracted" and "absorbed"—in the Benjaminian sense of the words—as if the person who had entered St. Mark's Church at 8:30 had been "exchanged" for another somewhere in the hour-long experience of witnessing. I didn't become more French, but I did become more human.

The space of St. Mark's is as much a character in Mauvais Genre as the thirteen dancers who compose its ensemble. The primary playing area is a large hardwood floor, surrounded on three sides with wide, tiered steps covered with grey carpeting. With several rows of audience chairs on the steps, and square, cushioned mats near the aisles and toward the front of the house, the architecture seems vaguely reminiscent of a noh theatre, one with, perhaps, a hint of Bauhaus modernism.

Two parallel rows dotted with square towers composed of small, thin, cardboard boxes, stacked up like a game of Jenga, line the sides of the stage, where carpet meets floor. Each box bears the name "Retrovir 300mg." Upstage, thirteen clusters of fluorescent light bulbs hang in a row—three long white tubes dangling vertically in each cluster—hovering about six feet above the ground. Beneath each, a black garbage bag, bulging with expectation, rests on the floor.

Without the usual theatrical warning, a performer enters and stands beneath a light. He is naked. [End Page 483] When he hits his mark, the fluorescent bulb above lights up like a Dan Flavin installation, exposing the intimate details of the dancer's frontal body. This happens twelve more times with twelve more performers. The audience remains quiet, respectful, embarrassed, and anthropological, watching as the bodies take turns rotating in precise forty-five degree increments, like a kind of human rotisserie, giving us perspective from all sides. As bodies shift, they land in various spatial relationships with one another—face-to-face, front-to-back, and back-to-back—and (homo- and hetero-) social and sexual narratives—both momentary and real—emerge, crystallize, and disappear from view.

Without affect or visible discomfort, the men seal their penises against their abdomens with two-inch-thick white adhesive strips. Women seal their unshaven labia shut with the same and, one by one, performers begin putting on layers of large, white, men's underwear—one pair over another over another—until they, like the garbage bags before them, bulge in diaper-like proportions. And so begins the show.

Mauvais Genre simultaneously invites our medical gaze and, somehow, allows us to feel the intensity of being watched and exposed, twisted and distorted, ourselves. As performers lie prostrate on the floor, convulsing and contorted, for instance—a man's breasts beat the hardwood floor; another's shoulder rotates out of socket, in circles, over and over; a woman balances the whole of her body on her two hands, her feet up in the air like some kind of torturous break dance before an inevitable...