It’s no secret. Entre chien et loup is intimately related to Dogville, the film by Lars von Trier that was released in 2003, which played with theatre within the cinema format. And that turns upside down not only the starting idea, but also harbours an attempt to consider a more promising and less violent future. The central theme: acceptance. Dogville was a gruelling tale about an enigmatic woman – Nicole Kidman – who sought refuge in a small community. Her desire to fit in pushed her towards becoming progressively more enslaved, accepting others’ desires. Christiane Jatahy is a film and theatre director who hasn’t worked in her country of Brazil since Jair Bolsonaro took office. There’s a Brazilian actress in this production, Julia Bernat, who plays a character named Graça.

Graça is the woman who puts European actors’ capacity for acceptance to the test with regard to a Latin American fugitive. The entire work plays out along this divisive line, this border, this crack that opens up between light and shadow, day and night, between the dog and the wolf, as the title claims, between goodness and threat, a dialectic that is formally expressed via the tension created between actor and character, between reality and fiction, between past and present, between cinema and theatre.

The work does not directly recreate the story from Lars von Trier’s film on the stage, but shows how a group of actors-characters get together in what the French call a mise en abyme, a fractal method of metalanguage that plays with building narrative structures that end up causing the incidents that make new meanings come to the surface. The actors-characters devote themselves to the experiment of redoing Dogville before audiences every night, but there is another film that represents the past and emerges to destabilise the present. The audience does not know what was shot before and what is being filmed now, producing an instability that touches upon nightmare at times. ‘The central question – recaps Jatahy – is how we can find the levers for change, to not keep being prisoners of repetition. In Brazil, the work of memory over the military dictatorship (1964-1985) has not been as successful as in Chile and Argentina. The past is between the dog and the wolf: you don’t kill him, you live with him like you live with a scar. And you’ve got to show this scar and try to prevent the reconstruction of a false narrative.’

*Statements by Christiane Jatahy from an interview published by Le Monde on 5 July 2021 for the premiere of the work at the Festival de Avignon 2021.