Un sentiment d'authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART

by Jacob Wren, Daniel Canty (Translator)

Un sentiment d'authenticité est un livre hybride, sorte de « roman sur PME-ART » qui se situe entre l'autobiographie artistique et le récit, dans lequel Jacob Wren revient sur plus de vingt années de création. Le récit commence lorsque le jeune performeur rencontre Sylvie Lachance et Richard Ducharme, et qu'il déménage de Toronto à Montréal pour concevoir un projet avec eux. C'est alors que s'amorce la passionnante histoire du groupe interdisciplinaire PME-ART. Dès ses débuts, Wren veut créer un théâtre dédié à l'acte de rester soi-même en situation de performance : cette quête deviendra le fil conducteur de son livre, mais aussi de son art et de sa vie. Avec une intelligence affûtée, qui évite toute complaisance envers lui-même, son milieu et la société, Wren revisite en détail sept des productions les plus marquantes du groupe. Il se dévoile en toute franchise et avoue, entre autres, son incapacité à apprendre le français alors qu'il est codirecteur artistique d'une troupe bilingue. Il aborde aussi les avantages et les difficultés des collaborations intensives, les paradoxes du leadership, les répercussions venant du fait de produire des oeuvres inclassables. Dans une prose parsemée d'anecdotes et d'observations douces-amères, s'approchant de l'oralité, parfois même du stream of consciousness, l'écrivain compose sa « dramaturgie des idées » et nous mène vers d'habiles moments de chute, tantôt drôles, tantôt émouvants. Jacob Wren signe ici un livre à la fois intime et ambitieux, qui vise à transformer la manière dont la performance peut s'écrire et se pratiquer aujourd'hui.

314 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Jacob Wren makes literature, collaborative performances and exhibitions. His books include: Polyamorous Love Song, Rich and Poor, Authenticity is a Feeling and Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim. As artistic director of the interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created performances such as: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize, Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information, Every Song I’ve Ever Written and Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition. He is co-founder of the orchestra The Air Contains Honey whose first album is forthcoming in 2026. His internet presence is often defined by a fondness for quotations.

Reviews

[Jacob Wren]

"I went to the theatre and what I saw hinted at my desires but mainly felt like their frustrating opposite. If in conventional theatre you had costumes, characters, acting, scripted narrative, piped-in music, and artifice, instead I wanted people dressed in their normal clothing, being themselves, walking a tightrope between structure and spontaneity, music we loved played on vinyl, CDs, or with instruments, anything and everything that might bring us just a little bit closer to authenticity or reality. There was a kind of theatre that already existed and a kind of theatre that didn’t yet exist, might never exist, and I knew which side I was on."


Stranger than Fiction: In Conversation with Jacob Wren:
http://bookhugpress.ca/stranger-than-...

Collaborating Towards Authenticity:
http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/au...

Feature Friday:
http://bookhugpress.ca/feature-friday...

Four passages from Authenticity is a Feeling:
https://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2021/...

Plus, for francophones: Quelques passages de Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART (Traduit de l'anglais par Daniel Canty) https://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2021/...

Order it here:
http://bookhugpress.ca/shop/books/aut...





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[Chad Dembski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A personal and thoughtful account of twenty years in the life of a performance creator with a company that is based in Montreal, Canada. It weaves gently between facts, stories, regrets, and memories of the performances of PME-Art and all the people involved in both making their work and presenting it. While it remains solely the voice of Jacob Wren it contains edits and thoughts from past collaborators who help fill in gaps or their own view of a situation.
As a performance maker for over years myself I found it a highly engaging read that surprises in going way beyond just talking about doing shows. It helps demonstrate the anxiety, stress and doubt that fill many a creative and administrative days of someone trying to run a performance company. He acknowledges the many contributions of that help put together a show and the two producers who have been with him since day one. His tributes are gorgeous, sad and very tender and help show a more vulnerable side not often seen in this community.

[SY · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful and thoughtful book about being fully yourself in collaborative work. This is not a guide book, nor does it have very many nice to say about collaboration, actually; rather, it shows just how truly scary, complicated, difficult and humiliating a true collaboration could be.

It is also a book about generosity, persistence and courage. Wren and his collaborators are rough with each other on stage. Yet Wren's retelling of these moments of public-private confrontation are so gentle, observant, poetic, and full of love. So many moments in the book made me feel so uncomfortable. And I wondered: isn't Wren just romanticizing his own very specific, and very public brand of hedgehog personality complex? Is authentic theatre and authentic life for him some sort of torture chamber, where all involved are so relentlessly committed to calling each other's BSs that nobody is ever going to be real enough? (He asked this question himself at one point in the book).

The big take away for me though is that being authentic and truly collaborative expands the dynamic palette of life and of art by many, many fold. Insofar as a fuller range of dynamics is always a positive value in art, then one would be tempted to argue that collaboration makes for better art. For Wren and his collaborators, this is also a better way to live. People of a weaker constitution however might prefer to keep the world at arms-length.

Wren is a highly gifted and extremely generous storyteller. Highly recommended.

[Bruno Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

truly amazing!