Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART
2018
Cover of the book. Photo: Marie Claire Forté Cover Design: Malcom Sutton
Cover of the book. Choix des libraires.
Cover of the book.
Cover of the book.
A compelling hybrid of history, memoir and performance theory, this book tells the story of the interdisciplinary performance group PME-ART and their ongoing endeavor to make a new kind of highly collaborative theatre dedicated to the fragile but essential act of “being yourself in a performance situation.” A compelling hybrid of history, memoir and performance theory by Jacob Wren, this book tells our story as the interdisciplinary performance group PME-ART, and our ongoing endeavour to make a new kind of highly collaborative theatre dedicated to the fragile but essential act of being yourself in a performance situation.
Written, among other things, to celebrate PME-ART’s twentieth anniversary, Authenticity Is a Feeling begins when Jacob Wren meets Sylvie Lachance and Richard Ducharme, leaves from Toronto to Montréal to make just one project, but instead ends up spending the next twenty years creating an eccentric, often bilingual, art. It is a book about being unable to learn French yet nonetheless remaining Co-Artistic Director of a Québec performance group, about the ordinary and extraordinary adventures of being continuously on tour, about the rewards and difficulties of intensive collaborations, about making performances that break the mould and confronting the repercussions of doing so. A novel about PME-ART. A book that aims to change the rules for how interdisciplinary performance can be written about today.
Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART, order it here
Published by Book*hug (Toronto). Written by Jacob Wren, with contributions from Caroline Dubois, Richard Ducharme, Claudia Fancello, Marie Claire Forté, Adam Kinner, Sylvie Lachance, Nadia Ross, Yves Sheriff, Kathrin Tiedemann, and Ashlea Watkin. With an afterword by Kathrin Tiedemann.
Book launches and readings at: Toronto, Type Books • Vancouver, READ Books • Montréal, FTA – Festival TransAmériques • Montréal, Drawn & Quaterly.
If I already held Wren in high esteem as a writer, artist, and person, this fascinating hybrid of memoir, archive, performance history and theory, and humorous storytelling reinforced that impression.
– Klara du Plessis, Montréal Review of Books
Some will come to Jacob Wren’s Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART for a history of the group, but there is a much wider readership for this book about the kind of self-questioning inherent in art making of the past 20 years.
– Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail, Toronto
In Authenticity is a Feeling, Jacob Wren investigates the possibility of “being oneself in a performance situation” – including the performance of this beautiful, quiet, vulnerable book. In it, he recounts his utopian efforts at nonhierarchical collaboration over the last twenty years – not only with the members of his oddball, charming performance collective, PME-ART, but also with his spectators and readers. As he once told an audience: “We’re only going to be in the same room together for the next hour and a half and then we’ll probably never see each other again. But so many things seem impossible nowadays. And just because something’s impossible doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.” Curious reader, open the book and try spending some time with him. It may even make some things seem possible.
– Barbara Browning, academic, dancer and author of The Gift, New York