Starring: James Gnam
Choreographer: James Gnam
Music: Loscil
Venue: Left of Main
Run Information: entre chien et loup was live streamed May 28-29.
Plastic Orchid Factory’s latest production evokes a paradoxical medley of emotions.
Uncanny, mundane, inquisitive, slow, sublime: these are just some of the words scribbled in my notebook to describe the latest solo creation by James Gnam and Plastic Orchid Factory, one of Vancouver’s premier experimental dance companies.
It’s incredibly difficult to describe this wildly theatrical work, which is forthright in its intentions, yet frustratingly enigmatic in the same breath. But perhaps that is it’s raison d’etre. The composition is, after all, titled entre chien et loup, French for “between dog and wolf”.
Gnam plays with the in betweens — the valley betwixt the familiar and the unfamiliar; comfortable and uncomfortable; human and inhuman. Untethered and underived, his creative palette is teeming with an exploration of the unknown.
The piece begins with a Robert Lepage-esque exploration of multimedia expression. Gnam, sporting a warm trapper hat, drags a tripod onto the stage while staring straight into the camera’s lens. It rattles in frenetic spurts and captures Gnam’s face in real time. His close-up is projected onto Left of Main’s back wall, which acts as a blank canvas for these video projects (designs by Gnam and Eric Chad) and James Proudfoot’s shadowy, purple-hued lighting design.
But the camera and tripod are not just used to capture Gnam. In one creative segment, the props are elevated from their primary function. The tripod becomes almost like a tango partner of sorts, as he shimmies his body under its legs and lifts it onto his back — twirling it around him.
Gnam’s various costumes, too, are used and manipulated: taken-off, folded, unfolded, zipped up. Mundane, yes, but choreographed in a way that is still theatrical — turning a familiar daily routine into sometime unfamiliar… uncanny.
Other times, it is just him contorting his torso and shoulders into unnatural shapes, succumbing to the pulses of Loscil’s sometimes colourless electronic music.
Like other Plastic Orchid Factory productions, entre chien et loup is wholly original and ambitious. But it’s missing a choreographic throughline — the agent needed to bind its ingredients together. In its present form, the 40-minute solo piece feels like a canvas of disjointed ideas — some brilliant, others less so — that vaguely revolve around an already obscure theme.
Its heart is in the right place. It just needs a little more refinement.
First Image: James Gnam in entre chien et loup. DAVID COOPER/PLASTIC ORCHID FACTORY
Joshua Chong 