Un sentiment d’authenticité :
ma vie avec PME-ART
2021
Cover of the book. Photo: Marie Claire Forté Cover Design: KX3 Communication
Cover of the book.
The book in a box. Photo: Daniel Canty
French translation by Daniel Canty of Jacob Wren’s Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART. A compelling hybrid of history, memoir and performance theory, 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, Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART begins when Jacob Wren meets Sylvie Lachance and Richard Ducharme, leaves 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 extraordinary and ordinary 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.
Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART, obtenir le livre
Published by Éditions Triptyque – Groupe Nota bene . 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 afterwords by Kathrin Tiedemann and Daniel Canty. Translated from English (Canada) by Daniel Canty. Editing: Marie-Julie Flagothier. Translation review: Sylvie Lachance and Marie Claire Forté. Linguistic revision: Luba Markovskaia. Proofreading: Aimée Verret. Graphic design: KX3 Communication.
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