December 22, 2022

PME-ART in 2022

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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.


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