A User’s Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling
2017
Jacob Wren with a record player on his head. Photo: Leontien Allemeersch
Jacob Wren playing a record. Photo: Leontien Allemeersch
Jacob Wren with a record player on his back. Photo: Leontien Allemeersch
Jacob Wren looking at a slide of himself. Photo: Leontien Allemeersch
Jacob Wren in a poncho reading from the book Authenticity Is A Feeling. Photo: Leontien Allemeersch
To celebrate twenty years of PME-ART, Co-artistic Director Jacob Wren wrote a book entitled Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART, a compelling hybrid of history, memoir and performance theory. A User’s Guide is a lecture-performance asking: why do we continue to believe so stubbornly in the fragile but essential act of being yourself in a performance situation; to hope against hope that our destabilizing tangle of art and politics might still, in some small way, change the world?
Books about performance never feel quite right, or at least never feel like enough on their own. Addressing performance requires performance. Therefore, we created an accompanying work entitled A User’s Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling.
It begins with Jacob reading excerpts from the book and showing photographs of the works in question, and then gradually moves toward an ever more personal and artistically vulnerable perspective on what the past twenty years have meant. It is an artist talk turned inside out, that tells more about artistic struggles and challenges than worldly success, raising complex questions as to what exactly it means to be making performance today. It is an author in dialog with his own strange book, and with his own life spent making collaborative work, casting a new, behind-the-scenes light on just why we do it.
The performance also notes the reactions of PME-ART’s past and current collaborators to the book, demonstrating how our shared artistic history creates collaborative dynamics that are complex, fascinating and all too human.
A lecture-performance by Jacob Wren, with the explicit or implicit contributions from PME-ART’s collaborators. Costumes by Claudia Fancello. Lighting by Paul Chambers. Production: Nikita Bala. Stage Manager: Tiffanie Boffa.
Residency, coproduction, and collaboration: La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines (Montréal), Inkonst (Malmö), and FTT (Düsseldorf) supported within the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. With the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Montréal.
Montréal, La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines • Düsseldorf, Forum Freies Theater • Malmö, Inkonst • Reykjavik, festival Everybody's Spectacular – Lokal • Vancouver, PuSh Festival/Western Front Society • Lisbon, Teatro do Bairro Alto
More authentic than ever, [Jacob Wren] who has spent the last 20 years creating works where his collaborators could (or even had to) “be themselves on stage” demonstrates here that authenticity is perhaps one of the greatest forms of genius.
– Ève Dumas, La Presse, Montréal
[…] An instructive and moving experience, which is both documentary and auto-fiction, lecture and performance, hat trick and duty of memory, the creator manages to bring the past to life, to question the present, and even to formulate some hopes for the future.
– Christian Saint-Pierre, Le Devoir, Montréal
[…] This hybrid lecture-performance perfectly embraces the mission of PME-ART: to demystify theatrical conventions and return to the fundamental role of theatre. In another register, the tgSTAN company had seized on a similar questioning by audaciously adapting “Le Paradoxe du comédien” […] Less mad, more modest and more audible too, Jacob Wren in his turn succeeded in his bet.