Pandemic lockdown puts a new, playful spin on James Gnam's entre chien et loup
The plastic orchid factory artist pulls out a wicked silver tracksuit and other apparel and props for a piece that dances between safety and threat, animal and human
Photos by David Cooper
Plastic orchid factory livestreams entre chien et loup, for free or by donation, on May 28 at 7 pm and May 29 at 5 pm.
THE MAGNIFICENT silver track suit that dance artist James Gnam will wear as one of his costume pieces in the new solo entre chien et loup has more significance than just its wow factor.
Like so much else in the piece, it is a sly and playful reference to pandemic times. Along with the rest of the world, he and his plastic orchid factory co-artistic director and wife Natalie Lefebvre Gnam have been living in jogging pants during the pandemic. He jokes that they pull out their best pairs for trips to the grocery store.
“It’s something we’re all living in. But I wanted it to be something strange and beautiful and transformative,” he says of the costume, which takes on extra dazzling effect in the work’s lighting and projections.
The outfit is a perfect example of how Gnam has distilled specific elements from the past 14 months of lockdown and turned them into something joyous, magical, and ever-shifting.
In French, the title entre chien et loup captures that mystique. Gnam discovered the old phrase while listening to a podcast about how wolves have evolved into dogs. It translates literally as “between the dog and the wolf”, and refers to dusk or twilight, when it’s too dim to distinguish the former creature from the latter.
“But it’s so much more nuanced,” Gnam enthuses. “It refers to that time of day when it’s just about dusk, and the shadows and light are playing with each other.”
The saying describes the in-between, and the paradoxes of the known and unknown, fear and hope, he says. And that became a resonant and poetic way to somehow capture the strange, uncertain but transformative limbo of pandemic life.
It was a limbo that wasn’t all bad for Gnam, who reconnected with his kids and their sense of play, especially during the initial months of lockdown. In late April last year, he posted a time-lapse video that captured 12 days—12 sunrises and sunsets—in his family’s living room, complete with Lego, TV, exercise, Star Wars toys, kids sleeping on the hide-a-bed for fun, and ever re-aligning children’s play tables and chairs.
“We really activated our house in as playful a way as possible,” says Gnam, who’s drawn on that kind of fun and make-believe, but also the fears that were happening outside the sliding doors, in his new work.
It wasn’t all easy over the year: with kids back at school, his family had to quarantine twice and get tested three times.
Entre chien et loup has become a solo made out of his pandemic experience but not directly about his pandemic experience, Gnam says. His ideas play out on multiple, fever-dream-like levels, not just in a physicality that shifts between the human-domestic and the animal-primal, but with live camera feeds, James Proudfoot’s responsive lighting design, Loscil’s electronic soundscape, and Eric Chad's generative projections. The piece will be livestreamed from Left of Main, the space plastic orchid factory renovated out of an old, upstairs dim sum restaurant in Chinatown a few years back.
Photo by David Cooper
The solo didn’t always look so upbeat. In fact, Gnam had been working on it for about a year when COVID-19 arrived in the world. Much of its initial inspiration had come from talking to his father about the Cold War, and relating that experience to talking to his own children about the looming climate disaster. The theme circled around intergenerational conversations about endings—of the world, of times, of relationships. He and his family were readying for a residency in Berlin when lockdown happened last spring, and the project was suddenly forced into a pause as he holed up with them for months.
“I was doing this work about the end of the world and it kind of, well, happened,” he notes with a dry laugh. “It was art imitating life. We didn’t know what was going on at beginning of pandemic—it was just about sheltering at home.”
By fall, with his two boys back in school and his company’s Left of Main open again for limited rehearsals, he re-approached the piece he’d worked on before the spring. But it wasn’t feeling right.
“It ended up being like a Charlie Kaufman movie, all meta and dark,” he relates. “Nobody wants to spend time ruminating on how hard it’s been this year.”
Around January 2021, he decided to abandon the solo and borrow from the playful impulses and curiosity he’d relearned from his kids over the year.
That’s when the cosplay started to come into the piece, not just with the world’s most awesome tracksuit, but with family artifacts: a kilt from his mother’s side and a faux-fur hat with ear flaps that’s a reference to old photos from his father’s Russian side.
“Underpinning all of this is trying to find genuine joy and pleasure in what’s we’re all doing,” Gnam says, adding that optimism seems to fit a new era, where vaccines and dropping infection numbers are offering a sense of hope. “I really feel like we’re turning a corner.” And maybe, just maybe, we can start going out in something other than jogging suits again—to places other than the grocery store.
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