.
Indigenous groups leading the movement against Line 3 include the Giniw Collective, founded by Tara Houska; Winona LaDuke’s Honor the Earth; the Rise Coalition and environmental organization MN350, both founded by Nancy Beaulieu; and Camp Migizi. To “deal with” the protesters, Enbridge opened an escrow account to reimburse Minnesota state and local agencies for the cost of policing their private interests. After Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources, which issued the permits for Line 3, law enforcement agencies received the largest payout from the escrow fund. Conflicts between protesters and the specially formed Northern Lights Task Force escalated to the police using LRADs (long range acoustic devices, also known as sound cannons), helicopters, rubber bullets, tear gas, and techniques they referred to as “pain compliance.” All this was paid for by Enbridge, and planned for in collaboration with Minnesota law enforcement based on case studies from Standing Rock.
Out of approximately nine hundred Line 3–related arrests since 2020, at least ninety-one protesters were charged with felonies. As of March 2022, sixty-six felony charges remained open. These numbers do not include the charges against Indigenous activists transferred to tribal courts. Felony charges, which vary from state to state but typically apply to violent crime and carry heavy penalties, are largely unprecedented for ecological protest. Direct actions along Line 3 were uniformly passive, involving no violence or property damage. Under most circumstances, such actions would result in the relatively minor misdemeanor charge of trespassing. But prosecutors wanted to create deterrents, and found creative ways to charge protesters with more serious crimes. Water protectors were charged with “assisted suicide” for climbing into and occupying sections of unused pipe, and “felony theft” for costing Enbridge money in the form of work stoppages by locking themselves to equipment or fences. Both carry penalties of up to ten years in prison. Meanwhile, a number of Line 3 activists subjected to “pain compliance” have sustained permanent facial paralysis in the form of Bell’s palsy.
As of January 2022, Enbridge had paid out $4.8 million to fund anti-protest policing.
Imagine if all these resources — the state’s, the corporation’s, law enforcement’s, the lawyers’ — went toward averting the mass extinction coming for us all, instead.
- from Bela Shayevich's article Migizi Will Fly
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December 27, 2022
December 22, 2022
PME-ART in 2022
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To state the obvious, this is such a strange time to be making live performance. I think I've performed in front of a live audience maybe four or five times in the last three years. In general, I don't perform as much as I used to, but this is of course considerably less than any time I can remember in my life. As well, I haven't left Montreal since February 2020. The last line of my bio used to be: "He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art." Currently, neither of those things are particularly true. (The current last line in my bio: "His internet presence is often defined by a fondness for quotations." This is of course very true.) I'm sure I'll tour again in the future but lately I've really been asking myself to what degree I'm going to return to it. The environmental impact of taking so many airplanes weights heavily on my ongoing questions about how to proceed. I still think I believe in live performance but what is the right model to make it happen? And are there new models that perhaps haven't yet occurred to me?
This past year PME-ART did perform our project Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition at FTA. This was a new version of our 2014 project Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie. The first time we rewrote Fernando Pessoa. This time we rewrote Susan Sontag. (With eight years between the two versions.) I have some vague plan to write more about these experiences in the near future. Let's see if that happens. In many ways I think I'm still prcoessing it all.
But what I have been thinking about the most as the year draws to a close is that, finally, after many years of working to make it happen (it took so much longer then I ever thought it would), we finally got a new PME-ART website online:
www.pme-art.ca
It used to be that, when people asked me what PME-ART was, I was never completely sure how best to explain it. (The short explanation I often gave: PME-ART is about being yourself in a performance situation - about the awkwardness and paradox of attempting to do so - and about working collaboratively on a specific theme for a rather long time. For example: we worked almost ten years on the theme of "hospitality.") And yet now there is a website and a book that might (or might not) help people understand what it's all about. (The book has also been translated into French by Daniel Canty.) I look at the website and ask myself: what is it all about? This thing that I've spent so much of my life doing. This thing that has taken up so much of my time for the past twenty-five years.
As I wrote earlier in the year: "Looking over all the projects we've done since 1998 gives me such a strange feeling. What exactly do all these projects have in common? Would it be better if they had more in common with each other? Or less? [...] So many decisions about what to make that were made in the heat of the moment. Or for reasons that then changed before the thing was made, or that changed as we were making it, as they should. A twisting path. An emotional rollercoaster. A story that now seems to have been told mostly in retrospect." Writing the book and doing the website definitely gave me more clarity and insight. But such clarities and insights only raise more and more difficult questions. What I've been wondering so much about lately is: how to be an artist for a really long time? Certainly no one gave me any advice about how to do so when I was starting out. And I wonder what advice I might give to others now that I've been writing books and making performances for thirty-five years.
I feel there is a kind of irony in my life in that I spend most of my time doing PME-ART, and yet what I'm mostly known for are my novels. (Also, I have two more novels that are finished but not yet out, the first of which is forthcoming in Autumn 2024, but that's another story.) The novels reach so many more people then the performances. The performances are so ephemeral. Sometimes I find myself wondering if any of it actually happened. But then I realize that it did.
PME-ART: a mix of non-dance, non-theatre and non-performance.
.
The only basis for truth is self-contradiction. The universe contradicts itself, for it passes on. Life contradicts itself, for it dies. Paradox is nature’s norm. That’s why all truth has a paradoxical form.
- Fernando Pessoa, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
Inspiration presents itself to me in the form of anxiety.
- Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
When I was 27, the concept of the washed up older guy seemed very entertaining. Now I’m starting to think that old age could be a lot more fun. Because really what have we got to lose?
- Lloyd Cole
To state the obvious, this is such a strange time to be making live performance. I think I've performed in front of a live audience maybe four or five times in the last three years. In general, I don't perform as much as I used to, but this is of course considerably less than any time I can remember in my life. As well, I haven't left Montreal since February 2020. The last line of my bio used to be: "He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art." Currently, neither of those things are particularly true. (The current last line in my bio: "His internet presence is often defined by a fondness for quotations." This is of course very true.) I'm sure I'll tour again in the future but lately I've really been asking myself to what degree I'm going to return to it. The environmental impact of taking so many airplanes weights heavily on my ongoing questions about how to proceed. I still think I believe in live performance but what is the right model to make it happen? And are there new models that perhaps haven't yet occurred to me?
This past year PME-ART did perform our project Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition at FTA. This was a new version of our 2014 project Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie. The first time we rewrote Fernando Pessoa. This time we rewrote Susan Sontag. (With eight years between the two versions.) I have some vague plan to write more about these experiences in the near future. Let's see if that happens. In many ways I think I'm still prcoessing it all.
But what I have been thinking about the most as the year draws to a close is that, finally, after many years of working to make it happen (it took so much longer then I ever thought it would), we finally got a new PME-ART website online:
www.pme-art.ca
It used to be that, when people asked me what PME-ART was, I was never completely sure how best to explain it. (The short explanation I often gave: PME-ART is about being yourself in a performance situation - about the awkwardness and paradox of attempting to do so - and about working collaboratively on a specific theme for a rather long time. For example: we worked almost ten years on the theme of "hospitality.") And yet now there is a website and a book that might (or might not) help people understand what it's all about. (The book has also been translated into French by Daniel Canty.) I look at the website and ask myself: what is it all about? This thing that I've spent so much of my life doing. This thing that has taken up so much of my time for the past twenty-five years.
As I wrote earlier in the year: "Looking over all the projects we've done since 1998 gives me such a strange feeling. What exactly do all these projects have in common? Would it be better if they had more in common with each other? Or less? [...] So many decisions about what to make that were made in the heat of the moment. Or for reasons that then changed before the thing was made, or that changed as we were making it, as they should. A twisting path. An emotional rollercoaster. A story that now seems to have been told mostly in retrospect." Writing the book and doing the website definitely gave me more clarity and insight. But such clarities and insights only raise more and more difficult questions. What I've been wondering so much about lately is: how to be an artist for a really long time? Certainly no one gave me any advice about how to do so when I was starting out. And I wonder what advice I might give to others now that I've been writing books and making performances for thirty-five years.
I feel there is a kind of irony in my life in that I spend most of my time doing PME-ART, and yet what I'm mostly known for are my novels. (Also, I have two more novels that are finished but not yet out, the first of which is forthcoming in Autumn 2024, but that's another story.) The novels reach so many more people then the performances. The performances are so ephemeral. Sometimes I find myself wondering if any of it actually happened. But then I realize that it did.
PME-ART: a mix of non-dance, non-theatre and non-performance.
.
December 8, 2022
Seven Tumblr posts that have gone viral.
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I think so far - more or less - I've had seven Tumblr posts that have gone viral:
This tweet that begins: "Gaza has gas. Sudan has gold. Congo has cobalt. Haiti has limestone. Afghanistan has copper. West Papua has crude oil..."
The classic cartoon Can I have a grant to finish my art?
This Paul Williams quote about being very careful about what you label a failure in your life.
This Mikkel Krause Frantzen quote that begins "Capitalism, in other words, inflicts a double injury on depressed people."
This Alfie Kohn quote that begins "When we set children against one another in contests - from spelling bees to awards assemblies to science “fairs” (that are really contests), from dodge ball to honour rolls to prizes for the best painting or the most books read - we teach them to confuse excellence with winning..."
This Wim Wenders quote about how "Every film is political."
And a Steven Cottingham artwork entitled Can You Come Over, Can I See You Tonight.
(I joined Tumblr in 2012 and since then have posted 12,802 times. As previously mentioned, I'm rather addicted to social media. And I often wonder what made these five posts go viral when so many of the other ones did not. Some things really connect with people in ways that, for me, often seem almost random. Something about the magic of the internet, the way things on Tumblr can snowball, more reblogs leading to more reblogs. Some aspect of the phenomena always peaks my interest. The way I can never really guess which particular post will do that particular thing. The way it always catches me by surprise.)
(Also, I can't believe I just publicly admitted I've posted on Tumblr 12,802 times. The addict has a need to confess. )
.
I think so far - more or less - I've had seven Tumblr posts that have gone viral:
This tweet that begins: "Gaza has gas. Sudan has gold. Congo has cobalt. Haiti has limestone. Afghanistan has copper. West Papua has crude oil..."
The classic cartoon Can I have a grant to finish my art?
This Paul Williams quote about being very careful about what you label a failure in your life.
This Mikkel Krause Frantzen quote that begins "Capitalism, in other words, inflicts a double injury on depressed people."
This Alfie Kohn quote that begins "When we set children against one another in contests - from spelling bees to awards assemblies to science “fairs” (that are really contests), from dodge ball to honour rolls to prizes for the best painting or the most books read - we teach them to confuse excellence with winning..."
This Wim Wenders quote about how "Every film is political."
And a Steven Cottingham artwork entitled Can You Come Over, Can I See You Tonight.
(I joined Tumblr in 2012 and since then have posted 12,802 times. As previously mentioned, I'm rather addicted to social media. And I often wonder what made these five posts go viral when so many of the other ones did not. Some things really connect with people in ways that, for me, often seem almost random. Something about the magic of the internet, the way things on Tumblr can snowball, more reblogs leading to more reblogs. Some aspect of the phenomena always peaks my interest. The way I can never really guess which particular post will do that particular thing. The way it always catches me by surprise.)
(Also, I can't believe I just publicly admitted I've posted on Tumblr 12,802 times. The addict has a need to confess. )
.
December 5, 2022
Some favourite things from my 2022
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[So it seems like I now do this list more or less every year. I really do love lists. As with previous years, this is in no particular order and many of these things didn't come out during the previous year. As well, there would normally be some performances and exhibitions on the list, but since the pandemic I'm still not seeing very many of either and therefore felt unsure which ones to include.]
Music
JPEGMAFIA – LP!
NNAMDÏ – BRAT
Cate Le Bon – Pompeii
Chelsea Carmichael – The River Doesn’t Like Strangers
Jimetta Rose & The Voices of Creation - HOW GOOD IT IS
Open Mike Eagle – Anime, Trauma and Divorce
Bron Area – The Trees And The Villages
Kalabrese – Let Love Rumpel - Part 1
They Hate Change – Finally, New
caroline – caroline
Gwenno – Tresor
Books
Diego Garcia – Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams
Tuesday or September or the End – Hannah Black
My Dead Book – Nate Lippens
Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary – Sakine Cansız
The Ministry for the Future – Kim Stanley Robinson
Activities of Daily Living – Lisa Hsiao Chen
I Need Music – Anaïs Duplan
Plus:
Some passages from Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary by Sakine Cansız
.
[So it seems like I now do this list more or less every year. I really do love lists. As with previous years, this is in no particular order and many of these things didn't come out during the previous year. As well, there would normally be some performances and exhibitions on the list, but since the pandemic I'm still not seeing very many of either and therefore felt unsure which ones to include.]
Music
JPEGMAFIA – LP!
NNAMDÏ – BRAT
Cate Le Bon – Pompeii
Chelsea Carmichael – The River Doesn’t Like Strangers
Jimetta Rose & The Voices of Creation - HOW GOOD IT IS
Open Mike Eagle – Anime, Trauma and Divorce
Bron Area – The Trees And The Villages
Kalabrese – Let Love Rumpel - Part 1
They Hate Change – Finally, New
caroline – caroline
Gwenno – Tresor
Books
Diego Garcia – Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams
Tuesday or September or the End – Hannah Black
My Dead Book – Nate Lippens
Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary – Sakine Cansız
The Ministry for the Future – Kim Stanley Robinson
Activities of Daily Living – Lisa Hsiao Chen
I Need Music – Anaïs Duplan
Plus:
Some passages from Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary by Sakine Cansız
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November 22, 2022
This curse of always feeling I should be doing something new...
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This curse of always feeling I should be doing something new.
Instead of trying to do something new, why not do something old and just do it really well.
Then again: what is new, what is old?
When I was young I didn’t suspect, but now it seems increasingly clear: the idea that there’s something “new” is little more than a colonial construct. There was nothing there before so I make a “discovery.”
There was always something before. Everything comes from somewhere.
But, nonetheless, I want something, something that gives me this misguided feeling of escape.
I question it completely. Yet the questioning doesn’t replace the desire.
There might be nothing new, but there are certainly things that are new to me. And those things have their own specific histories, whether I know it or not.
Histories one can certainly learn. And pay tribute to. And question.
Reinventing the reinvention of the wheel.
.
This curse of always feeling I should be doing something new.
Instead of trying to do something new, why not do something old and just do it really well.
Then again: what is new, what is old?
When I was young I didn’t suspect, but now it seems increasingly clear: the idea that there’s something “new” is little more than a colonial construct. There was nothing there before so I make a “discovery.”
There was always something before. Everything comes from somewhere.
But, nonetheless, I want something, something that gives me this misguided feeling of escape.
I question it completely. Yet the questioning doesn’t replace the desire.
There might be nothing new, but there are certainly things that are new to me. And those things have their own specific histories, whether I know it or not.
Histories one can certainly learn. And pay tribute to. And question.
Reinventing the reinvention of the wheel.
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November 14, 2022
Mark White Quote: "We were just flailing around trying to find some form that would represent, or bear witness to disillusion."
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I suppose you could say the Mekons were a way of bringing Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object and The Whole Earth Catalog together… I think an awful lot of the flailing around we did [as art students] was a search for form: What form is our disillusionment going to take? Quite how we ended up in bands I’m not entirely sure… We were just flailing around trying to find some form that would represent, or bear witness to disillusion. Certainly this is what the Mekons were doing… We never had the confidence that what we had to say would make any difference… But we knew we had to say it.
– Mark White (as quoted in No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk by Gavin Butt)
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I suppose you could say the Mekons were a way of bringing Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object and The Whole Earth Catalog together… I think an awful lot of the flailing around we did [as art students] was a search for form: What form is our disillusionment going to take? Quite how we ended up in bands I’m not entirely sure… We were just flailing around trying to find some form that would represent, or bear witness to disillusion. Certainly this is what the Mekons were doing… We never had the confidence that what we had to say would make any difference… But we knew we had to say it.
– Mark White (as quoted in No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk by Gavin Butt)
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November 8, 2022
Paul Williams Quote
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I did things in my 30s that were ignored by the world, that could have been quickly labeled a failure. Here’s a classic example; in 1974 I did a movie called Phantom of the Paradise. Phantom of the Paradise, which was a huge flop in this country. There were only two cities in the world where it had any real success: Winnipeg, in Canada, and Paris, France. So, okay, let’s write it off as a failure. Maybe you could do that.
But all of the sudden, I’m in Mexico, and a 16-year-old boy comes up to me at a concert with an album - a Phantom of the Paradise soundtrack- and asks me to sign it. I sign it. Evidently I was nice to him and we had a nice little conversation. I don’t remember the moment, I remember signing the album (I don’t know if I think I remember or if I actually remember). But this little 14 or 16, whatever old this guy was… Well I know who the guy is now because I’m writing a musical based on Pan’s Labyrinth; it’s Guillermo del Toro.
The work that I’ve done with Daft Punk it’s totally related to them seeing Phantom of the Paradise 20 times and deciding they’re going to reach out to this 70-year-old songwriter to get involved in an album called Random Access Memories.
So, what is the lesson in that? The lesson for me is being very careful about what you label a failure in your life. Be careful about throwing something in the round file as garbage because you may find that it’s the headwaters of a relationship that you can’t even imagine it’s coming in your future.
- Paul Williams
.
I did things in my 30s that were ignored by the world, that could have been quickly labeled a failure. Here’s a classic example; in 1974 I did a movie called Phantom of the Paradise. Phantom of the Paradise, which was a huge flop in this country. There were only two cities in the world where it had any real success: Winnipeg, in Canada, and Paris, France. So, okay, let’s write it off as a failure. Maybe you could do that.
But all of the sudden, I’m in Mexico, and a 16-year-old boy comes up to me at a concert with an album - a Phantom of the Paradise soundtrack- and asks me to sign it. I sign it. Evidently I was nice to him and we had a nice little conversation. I don’t remember the moment, I remember signing the album (I don’t know if I think I remember or if I actually remember). But this little 14 or 16, whatever old this guy was… Well I know who the guy is now because I’m writing a musical based on Pan’s Labyrinth; it’s Guillermo del Toro.
The work that I’ve done with Daft Punk it’s totally related to them seeing Phantom of the Paradise 20 times and deciding they’re going to reach out to this 70-year-old songwriter to get involved in an album called Random Access Memories.
So, what is the lesson in that? The lesson for me is being very careful about what you label a failure in your life. Be careful about throwing something in the round file as garbage because you may find that it’s the headwaters of a relationship that you can’t even imagine it’s coming in your future.
- Paul Williams
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November 1, 2022
a question I've been asking myself a lot lately
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This is a question I've been asking myself a lot lately and I'm wondering if anyone else has an answer. What is PME-ART?
(I guess it's a little bit like that Supertramp song: "I know it sounds absurd / Please tell me who I am")
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This is a question I've been asking myself a lot lately and I'm wondering if anyone else has an answer. What is PME-ART?
(I guess it's a little bit like that Supertramp song: "I know it sounds absurd / Please tell me who I am")
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October 31, 2022
I got to the show a bit early...
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I got to the show a bit early. They didn’t seem quite ready for me. Neither was I quite ready for them. What was going to happen? Most likely not very much. I didn’t know. Live music often took the edge off my depression. Often but not always. Or so I told myself. Maybe that is only the way it used to work. Did certain things really used to work? Lately I’ve been describing my mental state as some sort of nervous breakdown. Calling it a nervous breakdown sounds so dramatic, but I’m not quite sure what else to call it. Everything needs a name in order to exist. What else might I call it? The end of something and the start of something else, something unknown. The door is now open but I’m sitting just outside of it writing this. Sitting just on the other side of an open door feels like a kind of hope. That there is some opening and I will eventually find a way to go through it. When you’re going through hell, keep going. A nervous breakdown divided into four stages, like the four seasons, like four curses. The other day, when asked, I said I didn’t keep a diary. But I suppose these poems are a bit like a diary. A bit like therapy (that doesn’t work.) When I publish them (online) it is not because I think they are good. Automatic writing. A search for some kind of opening. Thinking aloud. The internet is filled with this stuff. As is my notebook. I realize that the door is still not open. The set up must be taking longer than previously planned. My experience is that everything takes considerably longer than planned. What does music do to me that nothing else quite seems to do. What do artists do when they hit a wall the way it seems I’ve currently hit a wall. On the other side of the door they’re still trying to figure out the soundcheck. This is only what I assume. My fear is a door will open and yet I will not know it’s open, and therefore not know how to go through. As if my nervous breakdown had a way out that might be either open or closed. If I had a bad cold I might stay home. But having a nervous breakdown I continue to go to work, as if work were both the cause and the solution. Can something really be both a cause and a solution? I wouldn’t publish these thoughts in a book or magazine, but it seems I have no problem putting them online, where they can easily be erased. Just one little click on the garbage can icon. And I haven’t even touched upon politics yet. I often think my despair has absolutely nothing to do with politics, even though politics gives much reason for despair. If I had an idea, we probably wouldn’t be able to do it for another four or five years, at which point I probably wouldn’t want to do it anymore. So there is no reason to have an idea now. But when is the right moment to have an idea? There never seems to be a specific moment set aside for just that task.
.
I got to the show a bit early. They didn’t seem quite ready for me. Neither was I quite ready for them. What was going to happen? Most likely not very much. I didn’t know. Live music often took the edge off my depression. Often but not always. Or so I told myself. Maybe that is only the way it used to work. Did certain things really used to work? Lately I’ve been describing my mental state as some sort of nervous breakdown. Calling it a nervous breakdown sounds so dramatic, but I’m not quite sure what else to call it. Everything needs a name in order to exist. What else might I call it? The end of something and the start of something else, something unknown. The door is now open but I’m sitting just outside of it writing this. Sitting just on the other side of an open door feels like a kind of hope. That there is some opening and I will eventually find a way to go through it. When you’re going through hell, keep going. A nervous breakdown divided into four stages, like the four seasons, like four curses. The other day, when asked, I said I didn’t keep a diary. But I suppose these poems are a bit like a diary. A bit like therapy (that doesn’t work.) When I publish them (online) it is not because I think they are good. Automatic writing. A search for some kind of opening. Thinking aloud. The internet is filled with this stuff. As is my notebook. I realize that the door is still not open. The set up must be taking longer than previously planned. My experience is that everything takes considerably longer than planned. What does music do to me that nothing else quite seems to do. What do artists do when they hit a wall the way it seems I’ve currently hit a wall. On the other side of the door they’re still trying to figure out the soundcheck. This is only what I assume. My fear is a door will open and yet I will not know it’s open, and therefore not know how to go through. As if my nervous breakdown had a way out that might be either open or closed. If I had a bad cold I might stay home. But having a nervous breakdown I continue to go to work, as if work were both the cause and the solution. Can something really be both a cause and a solution? I wouldn’t publish these thoughts in a book or magazine, but it seems I have no problem putting them online, where they can easily be erased. Just one little click on the garbage can icon. And I haven’t even touched upon politics yet. I often think my despair has absolutely nothing to do with politics, even though politics gives much reason for despair. If I had an idea, we probably wouldn’t be able to do it for another four or five years, at which point I probably wouldn’t want to do it anymore. So there is no reason to have an idea now. But when is the right moment to have an idea? There never seems to be a specific moment set aside for just that task.
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October 26, 2022
To make a compromise, but the right compromise...
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To make a compromise, but the right compromise, the compromise that pays off. To make a compromise like you’re making a bet. A strategic gamble, a calculated chance. To make a compromise that doesn’t turn out well. To believe, at the time, that you are being strategic, only to realize much later just how misguided the strategy actually was. To know that your compromise is only a guess. That your guess might, in the end, turn out to be completely wrong. But what if it had in fact paid off? It being the right or wrong compromise might only be a matter of luck. Or, then again, instead, to refuse all compromise.
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To make a compromise, but the right compromise, the compromise that pays off. To make a compromise like you’re making a bet. A strategic gamble, a calculated chance. To make a compromise that doesn’t turn out well. To believe, at the time, that you are being strategic, only to realize much later just how misguided the strategy actually was. To know that your compromise is only a guess. That your guess might, in the end, turn out to be completely wrong. But what if it had in fact paid off? It being the right or wrong compromise might only be a matter of luck. Or, then again, instead, to refuse all compromise.
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October 21, 2022
A text alongside Senescent Vivarium by Kyath Battie
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I wrote a text alongside Senescent Vivarium by Kyath Battie for VISIONS (and the film can also be viewed online for one month). You can read and watch it here: https://visionsmtl.com/2022/kyath-battie-2/
"Do we see what we know or see where the image is most tender."
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I wrote a text alongside Senescent Vivarium by Kyath Battie for VISIONS (and the film can also be viewed online for one month). You can read and watch it here: https://visionsmtl.com/2022/kyath-battie-2/
"Do we see what we know or see where the image is most tender."
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October 16, 2022
Bookshelves
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I guess reading and writing are the two activities that most take my mind off how miserable I am. Therefore I read and write a lot. But for some reason it doesn’t seem to be working as well as it used to. Which I find rather irritating. What is this slowly collapsing building we call the now? Not so slowly collapsing. A sudden awareness that I was about to make a considerable strategic error. A gradual awareness. Reading and writing are not the opposite of action but neither are they action. The question that continuously burns through my mind: what is going to happen? A space is opened by the lessening effectiveness of reading and writing to balance out my mood. But I cannot think of anything with which to fill this space. Or at least not anything I want to do. What do I want to do? What is going to happen? This is such a specific time in human history, in the history of all plant and animal species, in the history of all reading and writing. When I have nothing I want to read I often experience a great anxiety. Similar, but not quite equal, to the anxiety I feel now that I am finally running out of bookshelves. All the bookshelves are full. A feeling of ending as meaningless as my life.
.
I guess reading and writing are the two activities that most take my mind off how miserable I am. Therefore I read and write a lot. But for some reason it doesn’t seem to be working as well as it used to. Which I find rather irritating. What is this slowly collapsing building we call the now? Not so slowly collapsing. A sudden awareness that I was about to make a considerable strategic error. A gradual awareness. Reading and writing are not the opposite of action but neither are they action. The question that continuously burns through my mind: what is going to happen? A space is opened by the lessening effectiveness of reading and writing to balance out my mood. But I cannot think of anything with which to fill this space. Or at least not anything I want to do. What do I want to do? What is going to happen? This is such a specific time in human history, in the history of all plant and animal species, in the history of all reading and writing. When I have nothing I want to read I often experience a great anxiety. Similar, but not quite equal, to the anxiety I feel now that I am finally running out of bookshelves. All the bookshelves are full. A feeling of ending as meaningless as my life.
.
October 2, 2022
a rather specific yet vague and intense fantasy
.
I was trying to imagine what kind of performance work I might make if everything in and around the collaborative performance work I currently make were to completely collapse. If I were to no longer be part of a company, no longer have ongoing collaborators, if I was no longer invited to participate in the international cultural circuit. Which always leads me toward a rather specific yet vague and intense fantasy: that I could then suddenly do all of the things that – for whatever reason – I don’t feel I’m currently able to do. And I imagine something almost completely underground. Almost completely invisible and illegible. No publicity. No profile. Somebody tells you that someone they don’t really know heard there might be something happening tonight. And they give you an address. It sounds intriguing, and you have nothing better to do, so you decide to give it a try. When you get there it’s dark, hardly any streetlights, but you sense something and hear faint sounds at the end of a long alleyway. The building itself is hard to decipher, somewhere between a large shack and a four car garage. Really rough around the edges. Not exactly dirty but definitely not clear. When you find your way inside there are some people doing things. It’s difficult to entirely know who is a performer and who is simply an audience member like you. Or if the performance has even started yet. You don’t recognize any of the artists and have absolutely no idea who the work is by, if it’s by anyone. I don’t even really have any idea what would happen or what the performance would be like. Things would happen all around you and you would find yourself wondering what it was all about. But the situation would be so strange, so unlike what you were used to when you go to see a show at a theatre or a gallery. And for some reason you would always remember it even though you would never really figure out just exactly what it was. (Of course I have absolutely no idea how I would pay for any of this.)
.
I was trying to imagine what kind of performance work I might make if everything in and around the collaborative performance work I currently make were to completely collapse. If I were to no longer be part of a company, no longer have ongoing collaborators, if I was no longer invited to participate in the international cultural circuit. Which always leads me toward a rather specific yet vague and intense fantasy: that I could then suddenly do all of the things that – for whatever reason – I don’t feel I’m currently able to do. And I imagine something almost completely underground. Almost completely invisible and illegible. No publicity. No profile. Somebody tells you that someone they don’t really know heard there might be something happening tonight. And they give you an address. It sounds intriguing, and you have nothing better to do, so you decide to give it a try. When you get there it’s dark, hardly any streetlights, but you sense something and hear faint sounds at the end of a long alleyway. The building itself is hard to decipher, somewhere between a large shack and a four car garage. Really rough around the edges. Not exactly dirty but definitely not clear. When you find your way inside there are some people doing things. It’s difficult to entirely know who is a performer and who is simply an audience member like you. Or if the performance has even started yet. You don’t recognize any of the artists and have absolutely no idea who the work is by, if it’s by anyone. I don’t even really have any idea what would happen or what the performance would be like. Things would happen all around you and you would find yourself wondering what it was all about. But the situation would be so strange, so unlike what you were used to when you go to see a show at a theatre or a gallery. And for some reason you would always remember it even though you would never really figure out just exactly what it was. (Of course I have absolutely no idea how I would pay for any of this.)
.
September 15, 2022
Some passages from The Purpose of Power by Alicia Garza
Some passages from The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall by Alicia Garza:
*
Movements do not have official moments when they start and end, and there is never just one person who initiates them. Movements are much more like waves then they are like light switches. Waves ebb and flow, but they are perpetual, their starting point unknown, their ending point undetermined, their direction dependent upon the conditions that surround them and the barriers that obstruct them. We inherit movements. We recommit to them over and over again even when they break our hearts, because they are essential to our survival.
*
Recently I was in a staff retreat with my team at the Black Futures lab, an organization I started in 2018 to make Black communities powerful in politics. We were discussing a breakdown in communication, trying to get to the root of how it happened, ostensibly so we could avoid it happening again. At a certain point in the conversation, the facilitator interrupted and said, “When I was growing up and I would get into an argument with my mother, she would say to me, ‘What happens between us is half yours and half mine.’ I want to encourage you all to take that approach here – how would the story of what happened change if you all acknowledged that what happened between you is half yours and half theirs?” I found that to be a helpful intervention…
*
How do we make new mistakes and learn new lessons rather than continue to repeat the same mistakes and be disillusioned to learn that they merely reproduce the same results?
*
Many of my teachers, trainers, and mentors have fallen into a pattern of making their political circles smaller and smaller rather than bigger and wider – whether that be in formal organizations or efforts that are organized but not housed in organizations. They look for people who think like them – who experience the same anxiety about having to engage in a world where not everyone thinks like you – and have adopted the idea that finding a group of people who think like you and being loud about your ideas is somehow building power. To be fair, we all to an extent look for our tribes, look for the places where we belong and where we can just be ourselves. But when it comes to politics, when it comes to governing, when it comes to building power, being small is something we cannot afford. And while I feel most comfortable around people who think like me and share my experiences, the longer I’m in the practice of building a movement, the more I realize that movement building isn’t about finding your tribe – it’s about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals. It’s about being able to solve real problems in people’s lives, and it’s about changing how we think about and express who we are together.
*
Some are surprised to learn that movements for justice can be guilty of the same dynamics they seek to challenge. I have been to thousands of meetings, conferences, convenings, gatherings, and campaigns that failed to live, in practice, the world they claimed to want to bring into existence. Even the most radical organizations often fall short of their stated ideals. I’ve lost count of how many times organizations would state a value like “sisters at the center” and then pretend not to notice that women did the bulk of the emotional and administrative work while men did the bulk of the intellectual work. More than that, I spent ten years of my life in an organization comprising a majority of women of color, from the membership to the staff, and yet the few men in the organization watched those women do the bulk of the work of building with members, recruiting new members, organizing community meetings, setting up for and cleaning up after those meetings, navigating the difficult dynamics of coalitions and alliances, raising money for the organization, and responding to crises in the membership, while they waxed poetic with other men about what the movement needed to be doing and where it needed to go.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been referred to as sister, queen, and the like by my peers in movements and yet been offered no vision in those organizations for how the work we did would affect my quality of life. It seemed as though I was there not as a strategist, not as a tactician, not as a group builder but instead as a means to someone else’s – usually a heterosexual man’s – improved quality of life.
*
Decentralizing leadership, however, is not synonymous with having “no leaders.” Decentralization means distributing leadership throughout the organization rather than concentrating it in one place or in one person or even a few people.
Occupy Wall Street designated itself as “leaderless.” Everyone was a leader and no one was a leader. All that was required was that you show up.
The problem, however, was that simply declaring that there were no leaders didn’t mean there weren’t any. And declaring that there were no leaders didn’t address the fact that not only were there leaders but those leaders struggled to not replicate the leadership they were fighting against. Leadership was largely male, largely heterosexual, largely white, and largely educated at elite universities. If we perpetuate the same dynamics that we aim to disrupt in our movements for change, we are not interrupting power and we are not creating change – we are merely rebranding the same set of practices and the same dysfunctions.
.
*
Movements do not have official moments when they start and end, and there is never just one person who initiates them. Movements are much more like waves then they are like light switches. Waves ebb and flow, but they are perpetual, their starting point unknown, their ending point undetermined, their direction dependent upon the conditions that surround them and the barriers that obstruct them. We inherit movements. We recommit to them over and over again even when they break our hearts, because they are essential to our survival.
*
Recently I was in a staff retreat with my team at the Black Futures lab, an organization I started in 2018 to make Black communities powerful in politics. We were discussing a breakdown in communication, trying to get to the root of how it happened, ostensibly so we could avoid it happening again. At a certain point in the conversation, the facilitator interrupted and said, “When I was growing up and I would get into an argument with my mother, she would say to me, ‘What happens between us is half yours and half mine.’ I want to encourage you all to take that approach here – how would the story of what happened change if you all acknowledged that what happened between you is half yours and half theirs?” I found that to be a helpful intervention…
*
How do we make new mistakes and learn new lessons rather than continue to repeat the same mistakes and be disillusioned to learn that they merely reproduce the same results?
*
Many of my teachers, trainers, and mentors have fallen into a pattern of making their political circles smaller and smaller rather than bigger and wider – whether that be in formal organizations or efforts that are organized but not housed in organizations. They look for people who think like them – who experience the same anxiety about having to engage in a world where not everyone thinks like you – and have adopted the idea that finding a group of people who think like you and being loud about your ideas is somehow building power. To be fair, we all to an extent look for our tribes, look for the places where we belong and where we can just be ourselves. But when it comes to politics, when it comes to governing, when it comes to building power, being small is something we cannot afford. And while I feel most comfortable around people who think like me and share my experiences, the longer I’m in the practice of building a movement, the more I realize that movement building isn’t about finding your tribe – it’s about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals. It’s about being able to solve real problems in people’s lives, and it’s about changing how we think about and express who we are together.
*
Some are surprised to learn that movements for justice can be guilty of the same dynamics they seek to challenge. I have been to thousands of meetings, conferences, convenings, gatherings, and campaigns that failed to live, in practice, the world they claimed to want to bring into existence. Even the most radical organizations often fall short of their stated ideals. I’ve lost count of how many times organizations would state a value like “sisters at the center” and then pretend not to notice that women did the bulk of the emotional and administrative work while men did the bulk of the intellectual work. More than that, I spent ten years of my life in an organization comprising a majority of women of color, from the membership to the staff, and yet the few men in the organization watched those women do the bulk of the work of building with members, recruiting new members, organizing community meetings, setting up for and cleaning up after those meetings, navigating the difficult dynamics of coalitions and alliances, raising money for the organization, and responding to crises in the membership, while they waxed poetic with other men about what the movement needed to be doing and where it needed to go.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been referred to as sister, queen, and the like by my peers in movements and yet been offered no vision in those organizations for how the work we did would affect my quality of life. It seemed as though I was there not as a strategist, not as a tactician, not as a group builder but instead as a means to someone else’s – usually a heterosexual man’s – improved quality of life.
*
Decentralizing leadership, however, is not synonymous with having “no leaders.” Decentralization means distributing leadership throughout the organization rather than concentrating it in one place or in one person or even a few people.
Occupy Wall Street designated itself as “leaderless.” Everyone was a leader and no one was a leader. All that was required was that you show up.
The problem, however, was that simply declaring that there were no leaders didn’t mean there weren’t any. And declaring that there were no leaders didn’t address the fact that not only were there leaders but those leaders struggled to not replicate the leadership they were fighting against. Leadership was largely male, largely heterosexual, largely white, and largely educated at elite universities. If we perpetuate the same dynamics that we aim to disrupt in our movements for change, we are not interrupting power and we are not creating change – we are merely rebranding the same set of practices and the same dysfunctions.
.
September 4, 2022
Overheard
.
Today in a café I overheard the following snippet of conversation:
1: You know how when you're young you hear about someone who becomes really famous. And you think: now they've got it made. But then ten years later they have new problems. They're worrying: How can I stay interesting? How can I stay relevant?
2: It never ends. And it gets harder.
.
Today in a café I overheard the following snippet of conversation:
1: You know how when you're young you hear about someone who becomes really famous. And you think: now they've got it made. But then ten years later they have new problems. They're worrying: How can I stay interesting? How can I stay relevant?
2: It never ends. And it gets harder.
.
July 19, 2022
An excerpt from Authenticity is a Feeling in tribute to Sven Åge Birkeland.
.
[An excerpt from Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART. In tribute to Sven Åge Birkeland, who was the first person ever to invite me to perform in Europe in 1996. Rest in Power Sven. You did so much.]
*
When the run ended I had to return to Toronto, but made it back to Montreal for the end of the festival (which, as its name suggests, lasted twenty days). I had a specific reason for returning: I wanted to meet Sven Åge Birkeland and Knut Ove Arntzen. That year Les 20 jours du théâtre à risque had been part of an exchange with Norway. Norwegian artists Finn Iunker and Lisbeth J. Bodd had come to Montreal to stage a reading of Finn’s play The Answering Machine. For the second part of the exchange, Quebec artists Carole Nadeau and Gilles Arteau were supposed to go to Bergen to stage a Norwegian translation of a text by Gilles. Sven and Knut Ove had gone to Quebec City to meet with Gilles about the project, but Gilles had for some reason stood them up. (Sylvie tells me she later learned the reason was a significant crisis in his professional life: the artist-run centre he had founded was closing down.) When Sven and Knut Ove returned to Montreal they were furious, they had travelled all the way from Norway to meet him and he hadn’t bothered to show up. They were thinking of cancelling the second part of the exchange. Quick on her feet, Sylvie said that if they didn’t want Gilles to be part of the project then she had another writer in mind and that other writer was me. I had never been to Europe. I don’t think I had ever even met anyone who had been to Norway, and I had certainly never met anyone who ran a theatre in Europe (Sven ran the BIT Teatergarasjen in Bergen).
At that time I was strongly feeling that my possibilities for making and presenting work in Toronto were running out. My work was getting steadily more experimental and Toronto theatre was getting steadily more conservative. People who liked my work were starting to feel they could no longer present it, that it would alienate viewers and funders alike, that it was a risk for them. (The name of Sylvie’s festival in Montreal was starting to seem more important to me every day.) A new conservative, provincial government – Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution” – was cutting everything, and therefore arts funding cuts could, at times, feel like the least of our worries. I remember reading that Harris had said: let them keep protesting until all the grass in front of City Hall has been completely stomped away. He didn’t care, protests or no protests he intended to cut. I remember complaining about the situation to a playwright I knew, and him carefully explaining to me that ‘hard times are good for artists.’ It was only years later I read a similar sentiment expressed in a different way by Roger Fry:
+ + + +
Marie Nerland picked us up at he airport. Marie visited Montreal recently and when I met her for coffee I had the thought – a thought I’ve had more than a few times before – that she was the very first person I met in Europe. Bergen looks a bit like a town from a storybook: small clapboard houses, winding paths and hills surrounding a small lake, never-ending rain (I was told Norwegians call it ‘the shower’). The BIT Teatergarasjen was located in a former garage, a cavernous space that had barely been renovated for maximum coolness. The show that had ended just before we arrived was called Everybody Goes to Disco, from Moscow to San Francisco – by the Macedonian company Montažstroj – which I thought was pretty much the best title for a show ever. I was there with Carole Nadeau to stage a reading of the Norwegian translation of the text they had commissioned me to write: Unrehearsed Beauty. And to participate in the conference TheatreTextContext, which I was told was about innovative approaches to making text for experimental theatre. The example given was Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, which had recently been staged by Robert Wilson. For Unrehearsed Beauty I had the idea to write a text that could be used in absolutely any way, as described in the subtitle: A series of theatrical proposals – to be repeated, discarded, performed simultaneously and/or recombined in any and all of the many possible combinations – all vaguely relating to the topic of the author’s considerable moral ambivalence. (Numbers 1-49 in a continuing series.)
I had started as a playwright but didn’t want to be a playwright anymore, didn’t want to put words in other people’s mouths, wanted instead to create situations that provided everyone involved with maximum autonomy. It somehow seemed more ethical to me if performers said and did things they could take full responsibility for. At the conference, Finn Iunker, who basically still wanted to be a playwright, said that he particularly didn’t like the term. As an example of why he found it inaccurate, he asked the room: have you ever heard of a shipwright? He preferred the term theatre worker, someone who makes something, someone who builds theatre piece by piece. TheatreTextContext was the first time I had been around so many people who explicitly wanted to see theatre change. But over the course of the conference I came to understand something I hadn’t understood before, that simply because we all wanted to see theatre change didn’t mean we were searching for even remotely the same things.
+ + + +
Knut Ove Arntzen is a theorist who teaches at the University of Bergen. His influence on Norwegian and international theatre has been considerable. One of the terms that Knut Ove coined, and introduced me to during that first visit to Bergen, was post-mainstream. If I understand it correctly, it has to do with the fact that there were many companies making successful large-scale, experimental work in the eighties; this was the work he referred to as the experimental mainstream (for example, some of the same companies I had seen growing up in Toronto: the Wooster Group, Needcompany, etc.). These were shows for large stages and large audiences, that played at international festivals and often combined challenging ways of approaching dance and theatre with spectacular stagings and performer virtuosity. The work that came after, that was still just emerging in the mid-nineties, and that I was apparently a part of, was what he referred to as post-mainstream. This work was often smaller or ambient, privileging an engaged amateurism over clear virtuosity, and was often made by groups or collectives as opposed to one genius director or choreographer.
The term post-mainstream continued to follow me around for many years. When we performed in Zagreb, at the Eurokaz Festival, it was one of the key words in the program, along with the term iconoclastic. Then, much later, we were invited to Tokyo to perform at the Tokyo Post-Mainstream Performing Arts Festival, run by Hiromi Maruoka, who had picked up the term when she performed at Eurokaz with the Japanese company Gekidan Kaitaisha. A term that had travelled from Norway to Croatia to Japan, and then with me back to Canada. There was a moment when I even thought post-mainstream might succeed and become a key performance-related art historical term or movement – like postmodernism, surrealism, conceptual art, or relational aesthetics – but it seems within the kinds of performance worlds I inhabit that no single term can ever fully stick, no name for it ever become dominant. Years later there was Hans-Thies Lehmann’s book Postdramatic Theatre, named for a category that, it seems to me, encapsulated both the experimental mainstream and the post mainstream and, in Germany at least, this term might now be the one most widely used.
I was in Europe for the first time with a desire to place my work within some larger international context, and I was finding it, but as I was discovering it bit by bit I was also discovering how deep my dissatisfaction with theatre and the world were. Post-mainstream was an idea that more or less described what I was trying to do – and it was even a term that I liked, I actually liked the sound of it – but, like that old joke about not wanting to be part of any club that would have me as a member, I couldn’t quite imagine how all this new information could someday become a part of my artistic life. There was now a term that accurately described what I did, but how did that help me or what else did it suggest? I wanted it just as strongly as I didn’t.
+ + + +
One or two days before our staged reading of the Norwegian translation of Unrehearsed Beauty, Mads Ousdal decided to drop out of the project. The BIT Teatergarasjen had hired three actors from the Theatre Academy, and as we rehearsed I felt everything was going well, until we were told that Mads was leaving. Later, there was some speculation as to why he quit: that the work was too experimental, that he was worried it would make him look bad, that he was famous, or at least his father was a famous actor, but we weren’t treating him like he was famous, we were treating him like a normal collaborator. At any rate, we needed a solution and the solution was that I would play Mads’s role. (I was originally not supposed to perform at all.) Goril Mauseth and Elin Sogn would speak their already-memorized text in Norwegian translation and I would read the words I had written in English, since there was no time for me to memorize the text (and I obviously wasn’t able to read or speak Norwegian).
Carole created Unrehearsed Beauty with the audience sitting on the stage at small café tables, transforming it all into a more intimate space. Goril, Elin, and I would alternate between sitting at different tables, speaking our text in a quiet casual manner directly to the two or three audience members who surrounded us, and standing up, addressing the entire room. The show ended with the three of us sitting side by side in the normal audience seating, watching the actual audience, who were still all seated onstage, listening as Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche” played on a record player at 78 instead of 33 1⁄3, Leonard’s chipmunk voice bringing another off-kilter aspect of Canada into Norway. Afterwards, I was surprised to learn one of the aspects people liked most was how they interpreted my being onstage with the two Norwegians, and the mixing of our respective languages, as a kind of thematic staging of the artistic collaboration between Canada and Norway. This was of course the furthest thing from my mind – I was only filling in for a performer who had quit, but in doing so it seems the thematic territory had shifted more than we thought.
+ + + +
I sometimes think of these two coincidences that in many ways got me started (or, more accurately, got me started for a second time, since I had already been making work for almost ten years in Toronto). If Gilles had shown up for the meeting in Quebec City, it is likely he would have gone to Norway instead of me. If Mads had stayed in the project, it is likely those who saw it would have understood the work differently, and my role within the project would have felt considerably less prominent. Twice someone dropped out and each time I stepped in to replace them. If these replacements hadn’t happened, it is a distinct possibility I would have never gotten off the ground in Europe, or it would have all happened much later, or more gradually, or in some different way.
I don’t know if I should think of such occurrences as luck, chance, or opportunism. In a way they are examples of what I have always tried to do: take something negative or unexpected and turn it around so it might resemble a possibility. Anything that goes wrong might be also a chance for something nice to happen. At the very least it is unexpected, and therefore can shift us, even slightly, out of our routines and routine ways of thinking. I’m not sure I exactly like what I’m writing here. It feels to me too much like a motivational speech, an inspirational message, all that bullshit that can so easily devolve into capitalism insisting the individual must make the best of each and every situation, whatever hardships arise along the way. But if there’s anything I still like about performance, it’s that the unexpected might happen at any time, live in front of an audience or at any point during the process. It is a place where surprises can most productively occur, and it is still somewhat shocking to me that most shows are set up to ensure they so rarely do.
.
[An excerpt from Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART. In tribute to Sven Åge Birkeland, who was the first person ever to invite me to perform in Europe in 1996. Rest in Power Sven. You did so much.]
*
When the run ended I had to return to Toronto, but made it back to Montreal for the end of the festival (which, as its name suggests, lasted twenty days). I had a specific reason for returning: I wanted to meet Sven Åge Birkeland and Knut Ove Arntzen. That year Les 20 jours du théâtre à risque had been part of an exchange with Norway. Norwegian artists Finn Iunker and Lisbeth J. Bodd had come to Montreal to stage a reading of Finn’s play The Answering Machine. For the second part of the exchange, Quebec artists Carole Nadeau and Gilles Arteau were supposed to go to Bergen to stage a Norwegian translation of a text by Gilles. Sven and Knut Ove had gone to Quebec City to meet with Gilles about the project, but Gilles had for some reason stood them up. (Sylvie tells me she later learned the reason was a significant crisis in his professional life: the artist-run centre he had founded was closing down.) When Sven and Knut Ove returned to Montreal they were furious, they had travelled all the way from Norway to meet him and he hadn’t bothered to show up. They were thinking of cancelling the second part of the exchange. Quick on her feet, Sylvie said that if they didn’t want Gilles to be part of the project then she had another writer in mind and that other writer was me. I had never been to Europe. I don’t think I had ever even met anyone who had been to Norway, and I had certainly never met anyone who ran a theatre in Europe (Sven ran the BIT Teatergarasjen in Bergen).
At that time I was strongly feeling that my possibilities for making and presenting work in Toronto were running out. My work was getting steadily more experimental and Toronto theatre was getting steadily more conservative. People who liked my work were starting to feel they could no longer present it, that it would alienate viewers and funders alike, that it was a risk for them. (The name of Sylvie’s festival in Montreal was starting to seem more important to me every day.) A new conservative, provincial government – Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution” – was cutting everything, and therefore arts funding cuts could, at times, feel like the least of our worries. I remember reading that Harris had said: let them keep protesting until all the grass in front of City Hall has been completely stomped away. He didn’t care, protests or no protests he intended to cut. I remember complaining about the situation to a playwright I knew, and him carefully explaining to me that ‘hard times are good for artists.’ It was only years later I read a similar sentiment expressed in a different way by Roger Fry:
And here we touch on a curious economic accident, the importance of which as a determining condition of art production has never been properly emphasized. In modern life, great works of art generally have been, and I suspect, almost must be, produced in defiance of the tastes and predilections of society at large. The artist, therefore, except in those cases where he possesses inherited means, must be able to live and function on an extremely small sum. He must exist almost as sparrows do, by picking up the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. What wonder, then, that periods of artistic creation and impotence are as hard to predict or account for as the weather itself! And yet there is a certain irony in the fact that every civilization is ultimately judged by what of spiritual value it has contributed to the human patrimony. It is only at each present moment that this appears to be of so little consequence as to be negligible.As I was sitting on the train, on my way to Montreal to meet Sven and Knut Ove for the first time, I wondered about my situation: if I could no longer continue to make and present work in Toronto, was it really possible that I could begin to do so in Europe. I believe at that time, in my mind, the answer was probably not. I found it hard to imagine anything more far-fetched.
+ + + +
Marie Nerland picked us up at he airport. Marie visited Montreal recently and when I met her for coffee I had the thought – a thought I’ve had more than a few times before – that she was the very first person I met in Europe. Bergen looks a bit like a town from a storybook: small clapboard houses, winding paths and hills surrounding a small lake, never-ending rain (I was told Norwegians call it ‘the shower’). The BIT Teatergarasjen was located in a former garage, a cavernous space that had barely been renovated for maximum coolness. The show that had ended just before we arrived was called Everybody Goes to Disco, from Moscow to San Francisco – by the Macedonian company Montažstroj – which I thought was pretty much the best title for a show ever. I was there with Carole Nadeau to stage a reading of the Norwegian translation of the text they had commissioned me to write: Unrehearsed Beauty. And to participate in the conference TheatreTextContext, which I was told was about innovative approaches to making text for experimental theatre. The example given was Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, which had recently been staged by Robert Wilson. For Unrehearsed Beauty I had the idea to write a text that could be used in absolutely any way, as described in the subtitle: A series of theatrical proposals – to be repeated, discarded, performed simultaneously and/or recombined in any and all of the many possible combinations – all vaguely relating to the topic of the author’s considerable moral ambivalence. (Numbers 1-49 in a continuing series.)
I had started as a playwright but didn’t want to be a playwright anymore, didn’t want to put words in other people’s mouths, wanted instead to create situations that provided everyone involved with maximum autonomy. It somehow seemed more ethical to me if performers said and did things they could take full responsibility for. At the conference, Finn Iunker, who basically still wanted to be a playwright, said that he particularly didn’t like the term. As an example of why he found it inaccurate, he asked the room: have you ever heard of a shipwright? He preferred the term theatre worker, someone who makes something, someone who builds theatre piece by piece. TheatreTextContext was the first time I had been around so many people who explicitly wanted to see theatre change. But over the course of the conference I came to understand something I hadn’t understood before, that simply because we all wanted to see theatre change didn’t mean we were searching for even remotely the same things.
+ + + +
Knut Ove Arntzen is a theorist who teaches at the University of Bergen. His influence on Norwegian and international theatre has been considerable. One of the terms that Knut Ove coined, and introduced me to during that first visit to Bergen, was post-mainstream. If I understand it correctly, it has to do with the fact that there were many companies making successful large-scale, experimental work in the eighties; this was the work he referred to as the experimental mainstream (for example, some of the same companies I had seen growing up in Toronto: the Wooster Group, Needcompany, etc.). These were shows for large stages and large audiences, that played at international festivals and often combined challenging ways of approaching dance and theatre with spectacular stagings and performer virtuosity. The work that came after, that was still just emerging in the mid-nineties, and that I was apparently a part of, was what he referred to as post-mainstream. This work was often smaller or ambient, privileging an engaged amateurism over clear virtuosity, and was often made by groups or collectives as opposed to one genius director or choreographer.
The term post-mainstream continued to follow me around for many years. When we performed in Zagreb, at the Eurokaz Festival, it was one of the key words in the program, along with the term iconoclastic. Then, much later, we were invited to Tokyo to perform at the Tokyo Post-Mainstream Performing Arts Festival, run by Hiromi Maruoka, who had picked up the term when she performed at Eurokaz with the Japanese company Gekidan Kaitaisha. A term that had travelled from Norway to Croatia to Japan, and then with me back to Canada. There was a moment when I even thought post-mainstream might succeed and become a key performance-related art historical term or movement – like postmodernism, surrealism, conceptual art, or relational aesthetics – but it seems within the kinds of performance worlds I inhabit that no single term can ever fully stick, no name for it ever become dominant. Years later there was Hans-Thies Lehmann’s book Postdramatic Theatre, named for a category that, it seems to me, encapsulated both the experimental mainstream and the post mainstream and, in Germany at least, this term might now be the one most widely used.
I was in Europe for the first time with a desire to place my work within some larger international context, and I was finding it, but as I was discovering it bit by bit I was also discovering how deep my dissatisfaction with theatre and the world were. Post-mainstream was an idea that more or less described what I was trying to do – and it was even a term that I liked, I actually liked the sound of it – but, like that old joke about not wanting to be part of any club that would have me as a member, I couldn’t quite imagine how all this new information could someday become a part of my artistic life. There was now a term that accurately described what I did, but how did that help me or what else did it suggest? I wanted it just as strongly as I didn’t.
+ + + +
One or two days before our staged reading of the Norwegian translation of Unrehearsed Beauty, Mads Ousdal decided to drop out of the project. The BIT Teatergarasjen had hired three actors from the Theatre Academy, and as we rehearsed I felt everything was going well, until we were told that Mads was leaving. Later, there was some speculation as to why he quit: that the work was too experimental, that he was worried it would make him look bad, that he was famous, or at least his father was a famous actor, but we weren’t treating him like he was famous, we were treating him like a normal collaborator. At any rate, we needed a solution and the solution was that I would play Mads’s role. (I was originally not supposed to perform at all.) Goril Mauseth and Elin Sogn would speak their already-memorized text in Norwegian translation and I would read the words I had written in English, since there was no time for me to memorize the text (and I obviously wasn’t able to read or speak Norwegian).
Carole created Unrehearsed Beauty with the audience sitting on the stage at small café tables, transforming it all into a more intimate space. Goril, Elin, and I would alternate between sitting at different tables, speaking our text in a quiet casual manner directly to the two or three audience members who surrounded us, and standing up, addressing the entire room. The show ended with the three of us sitting side by side in the normal audience seating, watching the actual audience, who were still all seated onstage, listening as Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche” played on a record player at 78 instead of 33 1⁄3, Leonard’s chipmunk voice bringing another off-kilter aspect of Canada into Norway. Afterwards, I was surprised to learn one of the aspects people liked most was how they interpreted my being onstage with the two Norwegians, and the mixing of our respective languages, as a kind of thematic staging of the artistic collaboration between Canada and Norway. This was of course the furthest thing from my mind – I was only filling in for a performer who had quit, but in doing so it seems the thematic territory had shifted more than we thought.
+ + + +
I sometimes think of these two coincidences that in many ways got me started (or, more accurately, got me started for a second time, since I had already been making work for almost ten years in Toronto). If Gilles had shown up for the meeting in Quebec City, it is likely he would have gone to Norway instead of me. If Mads had stayed in the project, it is likely those who saw it would have understood the work differently, and my role within the project would have felt considerably less prominent. Twice someone dropped out and each time I stepped in to replace them. If these replacements hadn’t happened, it is a distinct possibility I would have never gotten off the ground in Europe, or it would have all happened much later, or more gradually, or in some different way.
I don’t know if I should think of such occurrences as luck, chance, or opportunism. In a way they are examples of what I have always tried to do: take something negative or unexpected and turn it around so it might resemble a possibility. Anything that goes wrong might be also a chance for something nice to happen. At the very least it is unexpected, and therefore can shift us, even slightly, out of our routines and routine ways of thinking. I’m not sure I exactly like what I’m writing here. It feels to me too much like a motivational speech, an inspirational message, all that bullshit that can so easily devolve into capitalism insisting the individual must make the best of each and every situation, whatever hardships arise along the way. But if there’s anything I still like about performance, it’s that the unexpected might happen at any time, live in front of an audience or at any point during the process. It is a place where surprises can most productively occur, and it is still somewhat shocking to me that most shows are set up to ensure they so rarely do.
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July 10, 2022
Kim Stanley Robinson Quote
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"To get anywhere in this world you must hitch your tiger to your chariot."
– Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
[For some reason this quote really struck me. I seem to keep thinking about it.]
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"To get anywhere in this world you must hitch your tiger to your chariot."
– Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
[For some reason this quote really struck me. I seem to keep thinking about it.]
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June 29, 2022
I don't really know why I do many of the things I do.
.
I guess I started as a poet. But I haven't really published any poetry in a long time now. The other day someone asked me if I was someday thinking of doing another poetry collection and I guess I realized that I wasn't. At least not for the time being. Though I do write the occasional poem and there is a word file that I put all of these poems into, which does make up some sort of poetry manuscript (currently at 127 pages.) So I started wondering: is there any reason I don't want to publish these poems in the form of a book?
I'm not sure there's a reason. Maybe I will publish them someday. Keep adding more and more poems to the word file and then, eventually, just do it all as one book. Maybe just doing one book of poetry makes more sense to me and for that it would be better to wait as long as possible. Not several books but just one book when I'm old (or posthumously.) In general, I can't really imagine very many people reading it. And most of the poems are already on this blog if anyone wants to see them:
https://radicalcut.blogspot.com/search/label/A%20poem%20by%20Jacob%20Wren
Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that I don't read so many poetry books anymore. Every once and a while I'll take a look at one. Or if it's someone I know. But I guess I read a lot of poetry books when I was younger and now mostly read other things. I still like reading poetry. And I do read poems online. Whenever there's a poem in any of my feeds I always click on it.
But, as is mostly the case with me, the reason is probably there's not much of a reason at all. I don't really know why I do many of the things I do.
[The word document full of my poems is called: Loneliness Must Be Recruited In The Fight Against Capitalism.]
[And, of course, I will continue to write other kinds of books.]
.
I guess I started as a poet. But I haven't really published any poetry in a long time now. The other day someone asked me if I was someday thinking of doing another poetry collection and I guess I realized that I wasn't. At least not for the time being. Though I do write the occasional poem and there is a word file that I put all of these poems into, which does make up some sort of poetry manuscript (currently at 127 pages.) So I started wondering: is there any reason I don't want to publish these poems in the form of a book?
I'm not sure there's a reason. Maybe I will publish them someday. Keep adding more and more poems to the word file and then, eventually, just do it all as one book. Maybe just doing one book of poetry makes more sense to me and for that it would be better to wait as long as possible. Not several books but just one book when I'm old (or posthumously.) In general, I can't really imagine very many people reading it. And most of the poems are already on this blog if anyone wants to see them:
https://radicalcut.blogspot.com/search/label/A%20poem%20by%20Jacob%20Wren
Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that I don't read so many poetry books anymore. Every once and a while I'll take a look at one. Or if it's someone I know. But I guess I read a lot of poetry books when I was younger and now mostly read other things. I still like reading poetry. And I do read poems online. Whenever there's a poem in any of my feeds I always click on it.
But, as is mostly the case with me, the reason is probably there's not much of a reason at all. I don't really know why I do many of the things I do.
[The word document full of my poems is called: Loneliness Must Be Recruited In The Fight Against Capitalism.]
[And, of course, I will continue to write other kinds of books.]
.
June 25, 2022
a photo of me lying under the table
A photo of me lying under the table during a rehearsal for Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition.
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June 24, 2022
two books that really depressed me (draft-in-progress)
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During the pandemic I read two books that really depressed me:
The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart
and
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean.
Both books made it abundantly clear how well-organized, well-funded, strategic and insanely determined the people I think of as evil actually are. They know what they are against and continue - again and again, with ever-shifting tactics - to work toward the overwhelmingly destructive changes they envision. They are hypocrites but that doesn't stop them, they just keep fighting for what they want. The means justify the end, all strategies are considered. They work to short circuit all the ways mass movements are able to activate change. And they know the way for them to change things is by changing laws. If they weren't so sickeningly well-funded it wouldn't work. When you have the money to keep trying and trying, hiring as many people as necessary to brainstorm and implement, eventually you can find the things that work.
This isn't to suggest it's time for despair. It's probably never really time for despair. But an understanding of what we're up again is really difficult to stomach. Reading these books made me wonder: what would it mean for the left (however you wish to define it) to devote the same amount of time and energy to changing laws. But without the same amount of billionaire money backing such endeavours I find it hard to feel confident it would work. Yet I know there must be way. I keep coming back to the question of strategy and tactics.
This is the passage from The Power Worshippers I posted when I first read it.
And then, thinking about this post some more, I also find myself thinking that things continually change, the situation is never quite the same as it was in the past. The christian nationalists, libertarians and so many other parts of the far right have been fighting in this way for such a long time now. Perhaps their victories are in the present and their failures are in the future. The fact that they've been so successful in destroying society must also create some sort of opening. We can now so clearly see the world they are making and how few people it serves, how many lives it destroys, how it destroys the natural world we depend on for our very survival. Can their victories also mark the beginning of their end? I keep coming back to the question of strategy and tactics.
.
During the pandemic I read two books that really depressed me:
The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart
and
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean.
Both books made it abundantly clear how well-organized, well-funded, strategic and insanely determined the people I think of as evil actually are. They know what they are against and continue - again and again, with ever-shifting tactics - to work toward the overwhelmingly destructive changes they envision. They are hypocrites but that doesn't stop them, they just keep fighting for what they want. The means justify the end, all strategies are considered. They work to short circuit all the ways mass movements are able to activate change. And they know the way for them to change things is by changing laws. If they weren't so sickeningly well-funded it wouldn't work. When you have the money to keep trying and trying, hiring as many people as necessary to brainstorm and implement, eventually you can find the things that work.
This isn't to suggest it's time for despair. It's probably never really time for despair. But an understanding of what we're up again is really difficult to stomach. Reading these books made me wonder: what would it mean for the left (however you wish to define it) to devote the same amount of time and energy to changing laws. But without the same amount of billionaire money backing such endeavours I find it hard to feel confident it would work. Yet I know there must be way. I keep coming back to the question of strategy and tactics.
This is the passage from The Power Worshippers I posted when I first read it.
And then, thinking about this post some more, I also find myself thinking that things continually change, the situation is never quite the same as it was in the past. The christian nationalists, libertarians and so many other parts of the far right have been fighting in this way for such a long time now. Perhaps their victories are in the present and their failures are in the future. The fact that they've been so successful in destroying society must also create some sort of opening. We can now so clearly see the world they are making and how few people it serves, how many lives it destroys, how it destroys the natural world we depend on for our very survival. Can their victories also mark the beginning of their end? I keep coming back to the question of strategy and tactics.
.
May 22, 2022
PME-ART at Festival TransAmériques
.
PME-ART will be performing at Festival TransAmériques in Montréal with our performance-installation Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition.
“Seated around a large table, a group of artists apply themselves to the task of rewriting the journals and notebooks of the U.S author and activist Susan Sontag. They reappropriate her words and unpack their possibilities, altering the substance of the text by projecting themselves into it. Each fragment is read, shared, exhibited. Through this ceaseless communal labour, the performers produce a new, collective work that’s closer to us.”
With Burcu Emeç, Marie Claire Forté, Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Adam Kinner, Catherine Lalonde, Ashlea Watkin and Jacob Wren. Artistic contribution Claudia Fancello.
At Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, June 1st to 8th, from noon to 6pm and June 9th from 3pm to 9pm (for the making of the "monster book.") Free entrance, no RSVP required. Masks are mandatory. Note that June 6th is off.
Find out more on the Facebook Event or on the FTA website.
You can also read this article: Concordia's Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery hosts the PME-ART group
(And, if perhaps you'd like to explore further, you can also check out the new PME-ART website and the PME-ART Facebook page.)
Photos by Nadège Grebmeier Forget
PME-ART will be performing at Festival TransAmériques in Montréal with our performance-installation Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition.
“Seated around a large table, a group of artists apply themselves to the task of rewriting the journals and notebooks of the U.S author and activist Susan Sontag. They reappropriate her words and unpack their possibilities, altering the substance of the text by projecting themselves into it. Each fragment is read, shared, exhibited. Through this ceaseless communal labour, the performers produce a new, collective work that’s closer to us.”
With Burcu Emeç, Marie Claire Forté, Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Adam Kinner, Catherine Lalonde, Ashlea Watkin and Jacob Wren. Artistic contribution Claudia Fancello.
At Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, June 1st to 8th, from noon to 6pm and June 9th from 3pm to 9pm (for the making of the "monster book.") Free entrance, no RSVP required. Masks are mandatory. Note that June 6th is off.
Find out more on the Facebook Event or on the FTA website.
You can also read this article: Concordia's Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery hosts the PME-ART group
(And, if perhaps you'd like to explore further, you can also check out the new PME-ART website and the PME-ART Facebook page.)
April 28, 2022
New PME-ART Website
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We've been working hard over the course of the past couple years to create a new PME-ART website, documenting over twenty years of unexpected and innovative work:
https://www.pme-art.ca
This is where you can watch the online conference Vulnerable Paradoxes, download the related free PDF publication In response to Vulnerable Paradoxes, listen to Jacob’s teenage songs from Every Song I’ve Ever Written, as well as many other experiences. We are excited, since this is the first time PME-ART has really had a full website, casting new light on our history and practice.
A heartfelt thanks to everyone who made it happen: Development and writing by Fabien Marcil, Jacob Wren, Kamissa Ma Koïta, Sylvie Lachance and Burcu Emeç / Translation and editing by Marie Claire Forté / Graphic design by Kamissa Ma Koïta / Video editing by Muhammad El Khairy and Kamissa Ma Koïta / Web integration and additional design by Andi Hernandez
(We worked so long and hard on this thing and, for much of the time we were doing so, I kept thinking to myself: everyone has a website. No one is suddently going to get excited that we have a website now. It just sort of brings us up to speed with everyone else. Why are we working so hard on this thing? And I still don't really know the answer to that question. But, nonetheless, that's what we did and here it is.)
(Looking over all the projects we've done since 1998 gives me such a strange feeling. What exactly do all these projects have in common? Would it be better if they had more in common with each other? Or less? I've been doing PME-ART for about twenty-five years. I'm now fifty, so that's half my natural life. What to make of it all. I actually wrote a book trying to understand it better. But doing the website somehow opened up what I previously understood and now I find myself wondering about it all, all over again. So many decisions about what to make were made in the heat of the moment. Or for reasons that then changed before the thing was made, or that changed as we were making it, as they should. A twisting path. An emotional rollercoaster. A story that now seems to have been told mostly in retrospect. PME-ART: a mix of non-dance, non-theatre and non-performance.)
.
We've been working hard over the course of the past couple years to create a new PME-ART website, documenting over twenty years of unexpected and innovative work:
https://www.pme-art.ca
This is where you can watch the online conference Vulnerable Paradoxes, download the related free PDF publication In response to Vulnerable Paradoxes, listen to Jacob’s teenage songs from Every Song I’ve Ever Written, as well as many other experiences. We are excited, since this is the first time PME-ART has really had a full website, casting new light on our history and practice.
A heartfelt thanks to everyone who made it happen: Development and writing by Fabien Marcil, Jacob Wren, Kamissa Ma Koïta, Sylvie Lachance and Burcu Emeç / Translation and editing by Marie Claire Forté / Graphic design by Kamissa Ma Koïta / Video editing by Muhammad El Khairy and Kamissa Ma Koïta / Web integration and additional design by Andi Hernandez
(We worked so long and hard on this thing and, for much of the time we were doing so, I kept thinking to myself: everyone has a website. No one is suddently going to get excited that we have a website now. It just sort of brings us up to speed with everyone else. Why are we working so hard on this thing? And I still don't really know the answer to that question. But, nonetheless, that's what we did and here it is.)
(Looking over all the projects we've done since 1998 gives me such a strange feeling. What exactly do all these projects have in common? Would it be better if they had more in common with each other? Or less? I've been doing PME-ART for about twenty-five years. I'm now fifty, so that's half my natural life. What to make of it all. I actually wrote a book trying to understand it better. But doing the website somehow opened up what I previously understood and now I find myself wondering about it all, all over again. So many decisions about what to make were made in the heat of the moment. Or for reasons that then changed before the thing was made, or that changed as we were making it, as they should. A twisting path. An emotional rollercoaster. A story that now seems to have been told mostly in retrospect. PME-ART: a mix of non-dance, non-theatre and non-performance.)
.
April 14, 2022
Three Spring Poems Written Rather Quickly
.
1.
I’ve perhaps written enough for one person in one lifetime.
If someone were to read the entirety of my published works, depending on how fast they read, it would probably take them a few months. This seems to me a good amount of time to spend on a single author, because of course it is much more important to read many authors, as many as possible.
But of course I can’t stop. Can’t stop writing.
Will I write something in the future that is different or better than everything that came before?
And, if I do, will I or anyone else notice?
I don’t know if I ever really thought art was important. But I suspect there was once at least some small part of me that thought art was at least a little bit important.
However, in our current predicament, what seems important is: air, water, soil.
(Not necessarily in that order.)
(Not so much art.)
What seems important versus what I spend my time doing.
So many different shades of climate grief.
Will what I write in the future be any different than what I have written in the past?
Is there a future? (But this question is a dead end. We make the future one day at a time.)
What will I write today? / What will I write tomorrow?
2.
Poems.
I was young and wanted to write poems.
I thought poems would grab the reader by the throat and radiate all meaning that words and thoughts and feelings could contain.
But I did not want to write poemy poems. I wanted to get to the point. As sharply and precisely and quickly as possible.
I was young and wanted everything to happen now.
It was the eighties.
The eighties were already almost done.
I couldn’t find the poems I wanted to read so I wanted to write them myself.
And I did. So many fucking poems.
That were published. And read aloud at reading after reading.
And I learned that poems were almost nothing like what I had hoped for or thought possible.
They were something else.
And so was I.
3.
It is so easy to make meaningless art.
You don’t even have to realize you are doing so.
.
1.
I’ve perhaps written enough for one person in one lifetime.
If someone were to read the entirety of my published works, depending on how fast they read, it would probably take them a few months. This seems to me a good amount of time to spend on a single author, because of course it is much more important to read many authors, as many as possible.
But of course I can’t stop. Can’t stop writing.
Will I write something in the future that is different or better than everything that came before?
And, if I do, will I or anyone else notice?
I don’t know if I ever really thought art was important. But I suspect there was once at least some small part of me that thought art was at least a little bit important.
However, in our current predicament, what seems important is: air, water, soil.
(Not necessarily in that order.)
(Not so much art.)
What seems important versus what I spend my time doing.
So many different shades of climate grief.
Will what I write in the future be any different than what I have written in the past?
Is there a future? (But this question is a dead end. We make the future one day at a time.)
What will I write today? / What will I write tomorrow?
2.
Poems.
I was young and wanted to write poems.
I thought poems would grab the reader by the throat and radiate all meaning that words and thoughts and feelings could contain.
But I did not want to write poemy poems. I wanted to get to the point. As sharply and precisely and quickly as possible.
I was young and wanted everything to happen now.
It was the eighties.
The eighties were already almost done.
I couldn’t find the poems I wanted to read so I wanted to write them myself.
And I did. So many fucking poems.
That were published. And read aloud at reading after reading.
And I learned that poems were almost nothing like what I had hoped for or thought possible.
They were something else.
And so was I.
3.
It is so easy to make meaningless art.
You don’t even have to realize you are doing so.
.
April 5, 2022
Some passages from Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary by Sakine Cansız
Some passages from Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary by Sakine Cansız:
*
I knew I was right – a prison break would constitute an action taken against the enemy. If I’d been able to use the opportunity it would have been a good hit. Probably I was too optimistic, but this dream was just too beautiful.
*
It was just too strange. All those guys who supposedly loved me so passionately tended to idolize me. They hardly dared love me, they said, because of my goddess-like nature. But with their clumsy, unbounded, disrespectful, and cheap declarations of love, they essentially smashed an idol that they’d created. Their emotional world contained a drive to dominate others. Where did their woolly feelings begin, where did they end, what were they based on, and what were they good for? On the one hand, these men were secretive, egotistical, and individualistic; on the other, they were crude, exuberant, and absolute. At any moment their supposed love could flip over into a desire for revenge.
*
The woman friends I’d brough in lost confidence in me, saying my dreams were beautiful but impractical. That was bad. Yes, I lived in an exorbitant fantasy world, but the actions I fantasized about were doable. The question was, should we take risks and allow ourselves to dream, or avoid risks and reject dreams? I always preferred to take risks, and that was the choice I made my whole life.
*
At the hospital, we sat together in the waiting room for a while. The men wanted to know what had been done to us, and I told them what we’d been through. Fatma was silent. Her coldness was hard to take even in normal times, but now we were sharing our journey to death together. Everything about her was calculated and measured. What a strange person she was. I believe in recognizing life’s beautiful sides. I wanted to die laughing and dancing. I think only those who know how to value life are ready for death. Otherwise, neither life nor death has any particular meaning.
*
In prison, these events gave us strength and hope – and not just us but prisoners from other political organizations too. Some accused us, once again, of reckless adventurism – we’d heard that a lot when we first got to prison, especially from Kurdish leftists. They said it was madness to wage an armed struggle against the junta, which would then take revenge on the civilian population. But they feared the enemy more than they cared for the people. They thought of the enemy as an invincible, all-powerful force. When things got hot, instead of fighting him, they preferred to take a break. When the enemy proclaimed that he had annihilated all revolutionary thoughts, they believed him. Ultimately they just didn’t believe in revolution.
*
Her knowledge was of such immeasurable value that we tolerated her sometimes obnoxious behavior. She tended to squabble and interfere in everything. When bickering erupted, and women got angry at her, I tried to calm the waters by emphasizing Mevlüde’s positive qualities. But Mevlüde herself never shied from conflict. Replying to the general criticism of her, she said, “In the past I was worse – sometimes I couldn’t adapt at all. That’s why the friends sent me home. But I’m beginning to change myself and my behavior here.”
*
I thought of my own escape attempt back in Malatya. What a beautiful night! I’d been overjoyed, as if I’d done some important action. I’d actually succeeded in getting physically outside. I’d told myself, Now I’ve done the hardest part, I’m home free. I thought I’d really escaped. I imagined telling the friends about my successful escape. It was like a movie: August 20, 1980, the only beautiful night in Malatya! But no, I just made it to that point and didn’t know what to do next. I hadn’t done enough planning, and I didn’t know the area, so my success was short-lived. If I could have walked directly into a forest, I would’ve made it. In the mountains you can always hide, they provide protection. It was probably worse to be captured outside than to have not tried at all. If you’re too weak or clumsy, faint-hearted, or otherwise unable to even try something, that’s understandable. But to succeed at the hardest part, and still have enough strength to keep going, yet ultimately fail because you didn’t think far enough ahead or because you are overconfident and drunk with success… Did I enjoy taking risks? Being a victim? Making sacrifices? I had to think more about the concept of sacrifice. It had all started when I got angry. Conventional wisdom has it, “Those who stand up in anger, sit back down damaged.” But of course that was no justification.
*
In love there should be no lies or roughness. Yes, I was a dreamer, prone to illusions. My attitude toward love was utopian. Meanwhile I thrived on conflict. A moment without struggle was like torture for me. It was struggle that made life worth living and gave me strength.
.
*
I knew I was right – a prison break would constitute an action taken against the enemy. If I’d been able to use the opportunity it would have been a good hit. Probably I was too optimistic, but this dream was just too beautiful.
*
It was just too strange. All those guys who supposedly loved me so passionately tended to idolize me. They hardly dared love me, they said, because of my goddess-like nature. But with their clumsy, unbounded, disrespectful, and cheap declarations of love, they essentially smashed an idol that they’d created. Their emotional world contained a drive to dominate others. Where did their woolly feelings begin, where did they end, what were they based on, and what were they good for? On the one hand, these men were secretive, egotistical, and individualistic; on the other, they were crude, exuberant, and absolute. At any moment their supposed love could flip over into a desire for revenge.
*
The woman friends I’d brough in lost confidence in me, saying my dreams were beautiful but impractical. That was bad. Yes, I lived in an exorbitant fantasy world, but the actions I fantasized about were doable. The question was, should we take risks and allow ourselves to dream, or avoid risks and reject dreams? I always preferred to take risks, and that was the choice I made my whole life.
*
At the hospital, we sat together in the waiting room for a while. The men wanted to know what had been done to us, and I told them what we’d been through. Fatma was silent. Her coldness was hard to take even in normal times, but now we were sharing our journey to death together. Everything about her was calculated and measured. What a strange person she was. I believe in recognizing life’s beautiful sides. I wanted to die laughing and dancing. I think only those who know how to value life are ready for death. Otherwise, neither life nor death has any particular meaning.
*
In prison, these events gave us strength and hope – and not just us but prisoners from other political organizations too. Some accused us, once again, of reckless adventurism – we’d heard that a lot when we first got to prison, especially from Kurdish leftists. They said it was madness to wage an armed struggle against the junta, which would then take revenge on the civilian population. But they feared the enemy more than they cared for the people. They thought of the enemy as an invincible, all-powerful force. When things got hot, instead of fighting him, they preferred to take a break. When the enemy proclaimed that he had annihilated all revolutionary thoughts, they believed him. Ultimately they just didn’t believe in revolution.
*
Her knowledge was of such immeasurable value that we tolerated her sometimes obnoxious behavior. She tended to squabble and interfere in everything. When bickering erupted, and women got angry at her, I tried to calm the waters by emphasizing Mevlüde’s positive qualities. But Mevlüde herself never shied from conflict. Replying to the general criticism of her, she said, “In the past I was worse – sometimes I couldn’t adapt at all. That’s why the friends sent me home. But I’m beginning to change myself and my behavior here.”
*
I thought of my own escape attempt back in Malatya. What a beautiful night! I’d been overjoyed, as if I’d done some important action. I’d actually succeeded in getting physically outside. I’d told myself, Now I’ve done the hardest part, I’m home free. I thought I’d really escaped. I imagined telling the friends about my successful escape. It was like a movie: August 20, 1980, the only beautiful night in Malatya! But no, I just made it to that point and didn’t know what to do next. I hadn’t done enough planning, and I didn’t know the area, so my success was short-lived. If I could have walked directly into a forest, I would’ve made it. In the mountains you can always hide, they provide protection. It was probably worse to be captured outside than to have not tried at all. If you’re too weak or clumsy, faint-hearted, or otherwise unable to even try something, that’s understandable. But to succeed at the hardest part, and still have enough strength to keep going, yet ultimately fail because you didn’t think far enough ahead or because you are overconfident and drunk with success… Did I enjoy taking risks? Being a victim? Making sacrifices? I had to think more about the concept of sacrifice. It had all started when I got angry. Conventional wisdom has it, “Those who stand up in anger, sit back down damaged.” But of course that was no justification.
*
In love there should be no lies or roughness. Yes, I was a dreamer, prone to illusions. My attitude toward love was utopian. Meanwhile I thrived on conflict. A moment without struggle was like torture for me. It was struggle that made life worth living and gave me strength.
.
March 29, 2022
"there are musics that hunt for an exit"
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"As Pierre Boulez once remarked of liberal society, “The economy is there to remind us, in case we get lost in this bland utopia: there are musics which bring in money and exist for commercial profit; there are musics that cost something, whose very concept has nothing to do with profit. No liberalism will erase this distinction.” He might have added: in the bland “utopia” of value pluralism, where one thing is as good as the next, there are musics that hunt for an exit."
– S.D. Chrostowska, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and History
[I'm especially interested in that last phrase: "there are musics that hunt for an exit."]
.
"As Pierre Boulez once remarked of liberal society, “The economy is there to remind us, in case we get lost in this bland utopia: there are musics which bring in money and exist for commercial profit; there are musics that cost something, whose very concept has nothing to do with profit. No liberalism will erase this distinction.” He might have added: in the bland “utopia” of value pluralism, where one thing is as good as the next, there are musics that hunt for an exit."
– S.D. Chrostowska, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and History
[I'm especially interested in that last phrase: "there are musics that hunt for an exit."]
.
February 26, 2022
The Air Contains Honey at Les Salons acoustiques
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The Air Contains Honey at Les Salons acoustiques
Sunday, March 27th at 4pm
La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines
Order your tickets here: https://lachapelle.org/en/schedule/jacob-wren-adam-kinner-this-air-contains-honey
The Air Contains Honey is an “orchestra” that mixes professional and amateur musicians in search of a warmth and community spirit they may or may not find. All of their songs follow the same basic structure: a quote sung four times, an instrumental break, and then the same quote sung another four times. For the audience, as well as for the performers, this is a chance to hear an orchestra in the process of discovering its sound as it goes.
Featuring a combination of some or all of the following people: Nadia Chaney, Patrick Conan, Catherine Fatima, Michael Feuerstack, James Nicholas Dumile Goddard, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O’Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Stephen Quinlan, Rebecca Rehder, Erin Robinsong, Frédérique Roy, Jacob Wren (and possibly a few others.)
(The Air Contains Honey don’t perform very often. Don’t miss your chance.)
Facebook Event
.
The Air Contains Honey at Les Salons acoustiques
Sunday, March 27th at 4pm
La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines
Order your tickets here: https://lachapelle.org/en/schedule/jacob-wren-adam-kinner-this-air-contains-honey
The Air Contains Honey is an “orchestra” that mixes professional and amateur musicians in search of a warmth and community spirit they may or may not find. All of their songs follow the same basic structure: a quote sung four times, an instrumental break, and then the same quote sung another four times. For the audience, as well as for the performers, this is a chance to hear an orchestra in the process of discovering its sound as it goes.
Featuring a combination of some or all of the following people: Nadia Chaney, Patrick Conan, Catherine Fatima, Michael Feuerstack, James Nicholas Dumile Goddard, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O’Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Stephen Quinlan, Rebecca Rehder, Erin Robinsong, Frédérique Roy, Jacob Wren (and possibly a few others.)
(The Air Contains Honey don’t perform very often. Don’t miss your chance.)
Facebook Event
.
February 10, 2022
lowercase pamphlets & Sentences Written Over Time
.
I am happy to have my work be one of the first three lowercase pamphlets:
Sentences Written Over Time by Jacob Wren
New Bones: Abolitionism, Communism, and Captive Maternals by Joy James
Just anarchy: a conversation between carla joy bergman and scott crow
*
lowercase pamphlets (so far) are curated by carla bergman and chris time steele
Graphics and layout design by Maia Anstey and carla bergman, with support by Jamie Leigh Gonzales, and printed by Listening House Media.
lowercase pamphlets range in scope and topics, but are rooted in amplifying kinetic ideas. A common thread throughout the series is the writers are sure to inspire.
Themes from forthcoming pamphlets include, abolition, colonial time, autonomy, feminisms, madness, anarchy, and much more.
The pamphlets in their unique ways share stories of justice and freedom for all. Plus the pamphlets look cool.
Why pamphlets? Because we’re trying to find each other outside of the algorithms that seek to divide us. We think pamphlets are sometimes the perfect size for hashing out an idea in an accessible and fun way.
.
I am happy to have my work be one of the first three lowercase pamphlets:
Sentences Written Over Time by Jacob Wren
New Bones: Abolitionism, Communism, and Captive Maternals by Joy James
Just anarchy: a conversation between carla joy bergman and scott crow
*
lowercase pamphlets (so far) are curated by carla bergman and chris time steele
Graphics and layout design by Maia Anstey and carla bergman, with support by Jamie Leigh Gonzales, and printed by Listening House Media.
lowercase pamphlets range in scope and topics, but are rooted in amplifying kinetic ideas. A common thread throughout the series is the writers are sure to inspire.
Themes from forthcoming pamphlets include, abolition, colonial time, autonomy, feminisms, madness, anarchy, and much more.
The pamphlets in their unique ways share stories of justice and freedom for all. Plus the pamphlets look cool.
Why pamphlets? Because we’re trying to find each other outside of the algorithms that seek to divide us. We think pamphlets are sometimes the perfect size for hashing out an idea in an accessible and fun way.
.
February 6, 2022
MACHO INTELECTUAL by INVASORIX
I studied with a macho-macho-man
He was a very popular teacher
HE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL MACHO
HE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL MACHO
He impressed with his subjectivity
and everybody wanted to listen to him
DON’T PLAY DUMB
HE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL MACHO
He spoke to me about Foucault,
about discipline and punishment
And he just wanted to shut me up
to fuck me up and fuck me, to educate and dominate me,
to annoy and humiliate me, to bend me over and break me
to impress, flirt, outshine, confuse me
lecture me, bluff and indoctrinate me
He spoke to me about Ranciere, too.
I worked with a macho-macho-man
He was a cool guy
HE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL MACHO
HE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL MACHO
He spoke to me about struggle and self-determination
about anarchy and polyamory
DON’T PLAY DUMB
HE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL MACHO
You never stop talking
You never listen
and you only seek to stand out
HE WAS A PROGRESSIVE,
GESTURAL, RELATIONAL, GLOBAL-LOCAL,
MEDIEVAL, ENIRONMENTAL, HEDONIST,
ACTIVIST-ELITIST, VIRTUAL, CONCEPTUAL,
SPIRITUAL, INTERNATIONAL ARTIST
SITUATIONIST
I came across a macho-girl
She was a potential sister
SHE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL MACHO
SHE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL MACHO
We mistook fraternity
for ambition and competition
HERE, WHO IS, HERE, WHO IS THE INTELLECTUAL MACHO
We are sick of competing,
of self-sabotaging
of abuses of power
I don’t sell myself, I don’t exploit myself, I don’t let myself get fooled
Don’t hide, don’t pretend, don’t let yourself be censored
I don’t sell myself, I don’t exploit myself, I don’t let myself get fooled
Don’t hide, don’t pretend, don’t let yourself be censored
[You can find more INVASORIX here: https://invasorix.tumblr.com]
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January 17, 2022
Hey! Listen to me! I'm on the stereo!
.
Thanks so much to Nantali Indongo and CBC's The Bridge for having me on air the other day.
We talked about Cheap Trick, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, PME-ART, Vulnerable Paradoxes, Every Song I've Ever Written, Zoom meetings, being on tour, my Instagram, child star syndrome and so much more.
[As well, if you want to check out Momus covering the songs I wrote when I was a teenager you can find the playlist here.]
[And if the title of this post doesn't mean anything to you, you might want to listen to this.]
.
Thanks so much to Nantali Indongo and CBC's The Bridge for having me on air the other day.
We talked about Cheap Trick, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, PME-ART, Vulnerable Paradoxes, Every Song I've Ever Written, Zoom meetings, being on tour, my Instagram, child star syndrome and so much more.
[As well, if you want to check out Momus covering the songs I wrote when I was a teenager you can find the playlist here.]
[And if the title of this post doesn't mean anything to you, you might want to listen to this.]
.
January 13, 2022
My column in The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
.
I was happy to have a column in SDUK (The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge) published by The Blackwood Gallery. These are the three instalments:
The First Chapter
In Support of the Censure
In Spite of Defeatism
.
I was happy to have a column in SDUK (The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge) published by The Blackwood Gallery. These are the three instalments:
The First Chapter
In Support of the Censure
In Spite of Defeatism
.
January 8, 2022
Two short passages from Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART
.
I have such a strong belief in collaboration: as something thematically essential, as a place to make artistic breakthroughs that are simply impossible to make on one’s own, as a way to attempt to break our culture’s (and art’s) incredible over-emphasis on individualism and the individual artist, as a way to be a little bit less alone in the world. At the same time, I generally find the actual lived experience of collaboration to be incredibly difficult. Perhaps psychologically I’m not really made for it. I guess there’s a lot of tension in this paradox, and some of that tension must be what energizes the work. As I was writing this, a strange sentence suddenly popped into my head: the work of PME-ART is both too collaborative and not collaborative enough. There is something off-kilter about our way of collaborating with others, and out of this something I believe a different kind of performance might emerge.
*
Yes, I like that way of putting it, our “performances are also about escaping performance,” but I think for me this is almost true of everything that has value, that it somehow needs to attempt to transcend previous conceptions of what it might be or become. I believe somewhere Alain Badiou says philosophy must also embrace anti-philosophy, and that has something to do with my approach as well: performance must also embrace anti-performance, and also embrace everything else as well, everything that’s outside of performance, so much of life that most performance so casually ignores. I want something unexpected to happen, to be surprised, and to surprise myself.
“Finding ways to make performances incapable” is also a formulation I’m very much attracted to. I think, for me, this also has something to do with life: I don’t feel I’m able to live and yet I somehow continue to live anyway. Sometimes I say that I’m good at art, bad at life. And this feeling forces me to live my struggles with life within art, within performance. So the performance can never feel okay, there is so much conflict, difficulty, ambiguity, uncertainty in my relations towards it, and in the act of performing it in public, in front of people who might very well find life so much easier than I do. On the other hand, perhaps many of them find it just as difficult. Performance (or whatever we wish to call it) might be one of the places where we can find out.
You can read the full interview here: Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART
.
I have such a strong belief in collaboration: as something thematically essential, as a place to make artistic breakthroughs that are simply impossible to make on one’s own, as a way to attempt to break our culture’s (and art’s) incredible over-emphasis on individualism and the individual artist, as a way to be a little bit less alone in the world. At the same time, I generally find the actual lived experience of collaboration to be incredibly difficult. Perhaps psychologically I’m not really made for it. I guess there’s a lot of tension in this paradox, and some of that tension must be what energizes the work. As I was writing this, a strange sentence suddenly popped into my head: the work of PME-ART is both too collaborative and not collaborative enough. There is something off-kilter about our way of collaborating with others, and out of this something I believe a different kind of performance might emerge.
*
Yes, I like that way of putting it, our “performances are also about escaping performance,” but I think for me this is almost true of everything that has value, that it somehow needs to attempt to transcend previous conceptions of what it might be or become. I believe somewhere Alain Badiou says philosophy must also embrace anti-philosophy, and that has something to do with my approach as well: performance must also embrace anti-performance, and also embrace everything else as well, everything that’s outside of performance, so much of life that most performance so casually ignores. I want something unexpected to happen, to be surprised, and to surprise myself.
“Finding ways to make performances incapable” is also a formulation I’m very much attracted to. I think, for me, this also has something to do with life: I don’t feel I’m able to live and yet I somehow continue to live anyway. Sometimes I say that I’m good at art, bad at life. And this feeling forces me to live my struggles with life within art, within performance. So the performance can never feel okay, there is so much conflict, difficulty, ambiguity, uncertainty in my relations towards it, and in the act of performing it in public, in front of people who might very well find life so much easier than I do. On the other hand, perhaps many of them find it just as difficult. Performance (or whatever we wish to call it) might be one of the places where we can find out.
You can read the full interview here: Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART
.
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