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

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 œuvres 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.

Traduit de l'anglais par Daniel Canty.

Avec des postfaces de Kathrin Tiedemann et de Daniel Canty et 36 photographies en noir et blanc.

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Depuis la fin des années 1980, la pratique artistique de JACOB WREN est une combinaison étonnante de performances créées en collaboration, de littérature et d’arts visuels. L’essentiel de son travail en performance a été réalisé à titre de créateur et de codirecteur artistique de PME-ART. Il a collaboré avec des artistes comme Lene Berg, Pieter de Buysser, Tori Kudo et Nadia Ross sur divers projets internationaux. Ses romans ont été publiés en anglais, en français et en norvégien. Il habite à Montréal.

Son traducteur, DANIEL CANTY, est, comme lui, écrivain et artiste. Il a traduit des livres de poésie de Stephanie Bolster, Benoit Jutras, Erin Moure, Michael Ondaatje et Charles Simic et était le traducteur attitré du poète officiel du Parlement du Canada, Fred Wah, de 2011 à 2013.

Éditions Triptyque | Collection Difforme
En librairie le 20 janvier 2021 | 318 pages | 28,95 $
LIVRE: 978-2-89801-116-0 PDF: 978-2-89801-117-7

📚 Sur commande ici: https://www.leslibraires.ca/livres/un-sentiment-d-authenticite-ma-vie-jacob-wren-9782898011160.html
📌 Plus d'infos ici: http://www.groupenotabene.com/publication/un-sentiment-dauthenticité-ma-vie-avec-pme-art

🎥 Réalisation: Cédric Trahan




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A prison abolitionist detective novel.

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I'm thinking of trying to write some sort of detective novel set in a world without prisons. A prison abolitionist detective novel. I have no idea how this might work.



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in some shape or form

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I've been making somewhat steady progress on a new book for about the past year. And I was just about to start a new chapter in which I was planning write (in some shape or form) about the current fascism. (I haven't really written much about fascism since the Bush/Cheney years.) And I felt hesitant, not quite sure how I was going to address it. The writing of the book feels almost entirely paused since, at this particular moment, with the intensity of all the things that are happening, I suddenly feel less sure than ever.



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This feeling that the status quo will go to any lengths to protect itself...

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This feeling that the status quo – and those who most benefit from it – will go to any lengths to protect itself. Of course it will absorb, it will co-opt, it will close ranks, it will blacklist. But also (when necessary) it will kill, it will torture, it will scorch earth, it will annihilate. At the same time, the status quo isn’t fixed, it shifts in response to activism and protest. In absorbing its critics, internal changes can take place in unexpected ways and at every level. Such changes are never as much as we might hope for, but they are often significant. And then there are moments of possibly greater change, moments of crisis when everything might be rearranged. Before it eventually stabilizes into some sort of new status quo.



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Since apparently I do have some sort of double life...

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Since apparently I do have some sort of double life – half of my life spent making collaborative performances, the other half spent writing books – one question I often get asked is how are these two artistic lives similar and how do they differ. There are a couple of different ways of answering this question, and how I think about it has changed a great deal over the years.

I think at first I started writing novels, trying to re-invent myself as a novelist, as a way of trying to escape, or take a break, from my performance-making life. All of our performance work is based on the paradox and vulnerability of “being yourself in a performance situation,” and therefore in my novels you can almost see me actively fleeing from that limitation, doing all the things I would never allow myself to do in a live situation. Most of the things that happen in my books could physically happen in reality but the books are also, more or less clearly, not reality, more in the world of theory, thinking, dreams, parable and fable. So, in this sense, my books were a way of escaping from the overwhelming reality (or feeling of authenticity) that was at the heart of the performance work.

But then, over the years, I started to think of it all in a different way. Both my books and the performances have a fairly intensive quality of structured improvisation. At the very beginning of writing a new book I have some idea what will happen, but most of it is left open, and as I write I try to constantly surprise myself, keep myself on my toes, with the idea that if I’m engaged and surprised the reader will be as well. Most of our performances also have a clear structure in which much is left open, and as we’re performing there are always things, small and large, that have never happened before, that are happening in the moment, and this quality of moving freely through a pre-determined structure, and surprising each other, and surprising ourselves, is always my favourite aspect of the particular ways we engage with the act of live performance.

In some ways, if I were to now speak more specifically about Authenticity is a Feeling, it represents the two separate parts of my “double life” coming together, I often find myself thinking of it as a kind of car crash between the two separate parts of my artistic life, which for the most part, in the past, I’ve kept as distinct as possible. It’s a coming together of things that have never really come together before, and this is intriguing, though I’m still more fully trying to understand why and how and what it means and what the future repercussions might be.


- From the interview Stranger than Fiction: In Conversation with Jacob Wren



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