Michael Eddy on Authenticity is a Feeling

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"Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART, by Jacob Wren

Wren's book is a sort of biography of his performance art group PME-ART. His account of their work, whose aim is stripping away theatricality and “being yourself in a performance situation,” is therefore an exercise in nonfiction. But putting something in a performative frame or committing it to the printed word involve a sophisticated understanding of authenticity where irony, fluidity and hallucination are part of the deal (I tend to project confidence into the awkwardness of PME-ART performers, which can make them alienating as opposed to vulnerable). I think Wren agrees with me: “I am rewriting history from the perspective of now, because nonfiction is always also a kind of fiction.”"

- Michael Eddy, Committed to Irony




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Jacob Wren reads from his books

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Videos of me reading from and talking about my recent books:

Polyamorous Love Song Launch Reading
Polyamorous Love Song Interview
Rich and Poor Launch Reading
Rich and Poor Interview
Authenticity is a Feeling Launch Reading
Jacob Wren Introduces Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim


I recently posted on Instagram: "For the past few years I’ve been trying to figure out if there are ways for me to increase the readership of my books..." And one of the replies was: "I get it! What about videos? Your face talking to the camera? I can’t say what it would do for book sales, but you have a lot of followers already so reels could get good traction. When I go to your profile, I can see what kind of books you *read* but I don’t get a sense of what your books would be like or why I might need to get one. I think about this all the time for myself, so I’m just brainstorming out loud! Or pinning posts about your own books to the top row?" This is probably good advice regarding my use of Instagram. However, I would likely require technical assistance so instead I'm doing this. All of these videos, and much else, can also be found at: Jacob Wren Links



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truly amazing!

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Really nice to see this very concise Goodreads review for my book Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART.

Scrolling through Twitter...

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Scrolling through Twitter and I randomly see that claire rousay is reading my book:
https://twitter.com/clairerousay/status/1769129525349368109
http://bookthug.ca/shop/books/authenticy-is-a-feeling-my-life-in-pme-art-by-jacob-wren/

Sometimes it seems to me that the process of rehearsal is simply a process of emotional armouring...

 

A quote from my book Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART. As posted by Lucy Bellwood on Tumblr:

https://lucybellwood.tumblr.com/post/728466340736827392

“Sometimes it seems to me that the process of rehearsal is simply a process of emotional armouring: we will make everything absolutely perfect so no one will ever see who or what we really are.”



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PME-ART in Lisbon

I'm extremely excited to be travelling to Lisbon to perform A User's Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling at Teatro do Bairro Alto on October 13 & 14:

https://teatrodobairroalto.pt/en/event/a-users-guide-to-authencity-is-a-feeling

It will be my first time on tour since February 2020. (And I used to travel constantly.) Very curious to see what it's like to head back out on the road.

(Also, Lisbon is one of my all-time favourite cities. Also, I just realized - due mostly to the pandemic - that the last time I performed in Europe was five years ago.)

Facebook Event.

You can still order the book in either English or French:
Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART
Un sentiment d'authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART

There's also this video of a short reading plus my answers two short questions about Authenticity is a Feeling to celebrate the French translation.

And of course, if you're interested, you can find out more about PME-ART here.

Samson Young's Goodreads Review of Authenticity is a Feeling

It somehow caught me at exactly the right moment to read Samson Young's Goodreads Review of Authenticity is a Feeling:


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

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

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

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


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You can find the review here. And of course you can find Authenticity is a Feeling here.



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I Love Dick meets All That Jazz

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For the author's questionnaire they always ask the question: describe your book as ___________ meets ___________.

And for my last book I think I came up with one that was pretty good: I Love Dick meets All That Jazz.

This is the book: http://bookthug.ca/shop/books/authenticy-is-a-feeling-my-life-in-pme-art-by-jacob-wren/






Also available in French (translated by Daniel Canty): https://www.leslibraires.ca/livres/un-sentiment-d-authenticite-ma-vie-jacob-wren-9782898011160.html



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An excerpt from Authenticity is a Feeling in tribute to Sven Åge Birkeland.

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[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.]

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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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Four passages from Authenticity is a Feeling

Four passages from Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART by Jacob Wren:


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There are no individual solutions to collective problems. Nonetheless, it is individuals who must come together and figure out what to do. In all of this, there is the unaddressed question of leadership. The anarchist in me genuinely believes rotating leadership is a solution: people take turns taking the lead in the areas of their greatest competence, interest, or desire. Another similar collaborative idea might be: best idea wins. But art is so subjective, and for five different people five different ideas might each seem best. It has always been my thinking that if someone in the group feels strongly that we should do something, then we should do it, their strong desire shouldn’t be watered or sanded down by the democratic entropy of the group. I want the projects to be open enough to welcome the strongest impulses of each of the participants. This is my ideal, and like all ideals it is something I often fall short of achieving. Perhaps this ideal is not even best for every collaborative situation. In a sense, it is just another way of saying that I want to work in ways that are deeply collaborative while at the same time keeping our most intense individual artistic differences more alive than alive.


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


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I often say I don’t necessarily relate to people who make art, performance, or literature, but I do relate to people who make art, performance, and literature who think of quitting every fifteen seconds. Those are really my people. I call us the boy-who-cried-wolf set, since we always announce we’re quitting but never do, and therefore no one believes us anymore. It seems to me that anyone who works in the arts today and doesn’t have serious, ongoing doubts as to the validity or efficacy of the situation is not facing all of the current, inherent problems and questions with open eyes.


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Not as much now, but more when we first met, Sylvie would sometimes talk about the power of being the official opposition in theatre or in art. That the official opposition can sometimes do more to change things, both more to change the discourse and more to change concrete policies and actions, than those actually in power. The official opposition has the freedom to push as hard as they want, to act purely on principle, and by continually doing so they can keep things moving toward change.


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[These quotes can also be found translated into French here.]


[And feel free to check out the PME-ART website here.]



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Quelques passages de Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART (Traduit de l'anglais par Daniel Canty)

Quelques passages de Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART (Traduit de l'anglais par Daniel Canty):


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« Il n’y a pas de solutions individuelles aux problèmes collectifs. Cependant, ce sont des individus qui doivent se réunir pour déterminer ce qu’ils vont faire. La question du leadership reste sous-entendue et rôde au milieu de tout ça. L’anarchiste en moi croit sincèrement qu’un leadership rotatif est une solution : les gens prennent tour à tour les rênes selon leur plus grande compétence, leur intérêt ou leur désir. Une autre idée collaborative semblable : la meilleure idée gagne. Mais l’art est tellement subjectif et, pour cinq personnes différentes, cinq idées différentes peuvent sembler la meilleure. Je pense depuis toujours que, si un membre du groupe est fortement convaincu qu’on devrait faire quelque chose, on devrait le faire, la force de son désir ne devrait pas être diluée ou décapée par l’entropie démocratique du groupe. Je veux que les projets soient assez ouverts pour accueillir les impulsions les plus puissantes de chacun des participants. C’est mon idéal et, comme c’est le cas pour tous les idéaux, il s’agit d’un objectif que je peine souvent à atteindre. Peut-être que cet idéal n’est pas le plus approprié dans toutes les situations de collaboration. En un sens, ce n’est qu’une autre façon de dire que je veux travailler d’une manière profondément collaborative tout en garantissant que nos différences artistiques les plus intenses demeurent plus vivantes que jamais. »


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« J’allais au théâtre, et ce que j’y voyais éveillait mes désirs, ou incarnait surtout leur opposé frustrant. Dans le théâtre conventionnel, il y avait des costumes, des personnages, du jeu, une narration écrite, de la musique enregistrée, des artifices. Je voulais plutôt voir des gens porter leurs vêtements normaux, être eux-mêmes, marcher sur la corde raide entre structure et spontanéité. Je voulais entendre de la musique qu’on aimait sur des vinyles, sur des CD ou interprétée sur des instruments, tout ce qui pourrait nous amener un petit peu plus près de l’authenticité ou de la réalité. Il y avait une sorte de théâtre qui existait déjà et une sorte de théâtre qui n’existait pas encore, et qui n’existerait peut-être jamais, et je savais quel était mon bord. »


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« Je dis souvent que je ne me reconnais pas dans les gens qui font de l’art, de la performance ou de la littérature, mais que je me reconnais dans ceux qui font de l’art, de la performance et de la littérature, et qui toutes les quinze secondes pensent tout lâcher. Ce sont les miens. Je nous vois comme la bande de ceux-qui-crient-au-loup, qui annoncent constamment qu’ils lâchent tout sans jamais le faire, et que donc plus personne ne croit. Il me semble que quiconque travaille dans les arts aujourd’hui et n’entretient pas de doutes sérieux et lancinants sur la validité ou l’efficacité de la situation n’affronte pas avec lucidité tous les problèmes et questions actuels. »


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« Pas tellement maintenant, mais certainement au début de notre relation, Sylvie parlait parfois du pouvoir que confère la position d’opposition officielle en théâtre ou en art. Que l’opposition officielle est parfois capable de contribuer davantage à changer les choses, le discours, les politiques et les actions concrètes, que ceux qui sont au pouvoir. L’opposition officielle a le loisir d’aller aussi loin qu’elle le veut, d’agir par principe, et, si ses représentants le font avec constance, ils peuvent faire advenir le changement. »


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[The original English version of these quotes can be found here.]


[And feel free to check out the PME-ART website here.]



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Four PME-ART events in May/June 2021

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Mercredi 12 mai, 17 h, Virtuel:
Un second sentiment d’authenticité: Authenticity Is a Feeling à l’épreuve de la traduction avec Daniel Canty et Jessie Mill
Conversation conviviale
Regardez-le ici : Première partie, Deuxième partie


Monday, May 17th & Tuesday, May 18th at 5pm:
A User's Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling
La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines
20 ans de création et d’histoires par Yanik Comeau
Une question de risques par Guylaine Massoutre


Friday, June 4th at 10am:
En réponse à Vulnérables Paradoxes
With the participation of Aisha Sasha John + Burcu Emeç + Dayna Danger + Elena Stoodley + Kama La Mackerel + Kamissa Ma Koïta + Lara Kramer + Mai thi Bach Ngoc Nguyen + Malik Nashad Sharpe + Marilou Craft + Milton Lim + nènè myriam konaté + Po B. K. Lomami + Sonia Hughes
Online at the Facebook page of PME-ART
In collaboration with OFFTA / LA SERRE – arts vivants
Watch the video of the launch
Download: In Response to Vulnerable Paradoxes
Facebook Event

Mardi 8 juin, 17 h, Virtuel:
Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART
Présentation Jessie Mill / Lecture-performance Martin Bélanger + Marie Claire Forté + Nadège Grebmeier Forget + Kamissa Ma Koïta + Elena Stoodley
En collaboration avec Terrains de jeu du FTA
Regardez-le ici : Un sentiment d’authenticité
Facebook Event


Download: In Response to Vulnerbale Paradoxes

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

Order: Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

Bonus: video of short reading plus my answers two short questions about Authenticity is a Feeling to celebrate the French translation.

And feel free to check out the PME-ART website here.

Image: Daniel Canty

Image: Leontien Paula Allemeersch

Image: Kamissa Ma Koïta

Image: Fabien Marcil

Image: FTA

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

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

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

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

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


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



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Three Trilogies + One

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Unrehearsed Beauty (1998)
Families Are Formed Through Copulation (2007)
Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (2010)

Polyamorous Love Song (2014)
Rich and Poor (2016)
Authenticity Is A Feeling (2018)

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024)
Desire Without Expectation (2027)
Faithful Unbeliever (2030)

Failure Finds its Happy End (2033)


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In my current in-progress trilogy (which I also seem to be calling my final trilogy): Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024), Desire Without Expectation (2027) and Faithful Unbeliever (2030), all three books are based loosely around questions concerning the desire for utopia.

If I ever finish this final trilogy, Failure Finds its Happy End might be the plus one.

All of the published books have been, or are in the process of being, translated into French by Le Quartanier and Éditions Triptyque.

And if you're feeling extra-generous and want to help me continue writing books, you can find my Patreon here.



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Michael Eddy Quote

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One could argue, like Maus above, that the antidote to irony is actually authenticity. If the self-reflexivity I called for above meant authentic presence, maybe we could indeed eliminate the risk of artificiality in the vague appropriation? In a performance of Jacob Wren’s recent book Authenticity Is A Feeling, which recounts the history of PME-ART, the performance group he has headed for twenty years, Wren explained that his ultimate goal and what keeps him going is work that strips away the baroque theatricality of most performance art (like scripts, affectations, etc.). It may be odd to finish this essay on an example that seems to eschew the scaled plating of appropriation for some type of biographical vulnerability. But while I found Wren’s performance affecting, I also could not help finding it affected. “In a way this echoed something that had followed us since the beginning of the show: when you are being yourself, when you are trying to bring more of this reality into the performance situation, so many people think that because it is still theatre, taking place onstage everything you’re saying must not be true. Or at least they come expecting fiction, and when it’s so unclear how the things you’re saying match or don’t match this expectation, they can easily become suspicious.” In my suspicions of Wren’s call to “being yourself in a performance situation,” I display the ironic symptoms of so many people. But a few pages later, I get a sense of why I enjoy this suspicion, these symptoms: “I am rewriting history from the perspective of now, because non-fiction is always also a kind of fiction.” Authenticity always also has a kernel of irony, not least when representation is involved. If we hope to find a more productive and just form of appropriation based on authenticity and sincerity, I have a hunch that scenes of self abuse would be necessary to make us feel possessed of our identities; or that dedication to a principle of opacity would firewall errant interpretation; or that it may not be appropriation after all.

- Michael Eddy, Vague Appropriation



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Authenticity Was A Feeling: A conversation between Claudia La Rocco and Jacob Wren

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Authenticity Was A Feeling:
A conversation between Claudia La Rocco and Jacob Wren
Monday August 24th, 8:30 Berlin Time
Online at Tanz im August




And you can of course still order the book Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART here. 

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"Those are really my people."

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"I often say I don’t necessarily relate to people who make art, performance, or literature, but I do relate to people who make art, performance, and literature who think of quitting every fifteen seconds. Those are really my people. I call us the boy-who-cried wolf set, since we always announce we’re quitting but never do, and therefore no one believes us anymore. It seems to me that anyone who works in the arts today and doesn’t have serious, ongoing doubts as to the validity or efficacy of the situation is not facing all of the current, inherent problems and questions with open eyes."

- an excerpt from Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART



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An excerpt from Authenticity is a Feeling, featuring anecdotes regarding The Fall, Pavement and Parenthetical Girls

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[What follows is an excerpt from Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART from the chapter about The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information:]



There are a few stories we tell (and don’t tell) in The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information that so clearly resonate with my own ongoing struggles with collaboration:

A story about the Fall. About how the Fall had over sixty members, and the reason there were so many is that Mark E. Smith kept firing them. It goes without saying that many former members were less than happy about this situation. Mark E. Smith didn’t write any music and didn’t play an instrument. He only wrote the (generally brilliant) lyrics and spoke/sang them, and also gave commands in the studio and onstage as to how precisely the songs should be played. (In general he wanted them played with greater simplicity and more ferocity.) So members who were no longer with the Fall had written all of their best-known riffs and melodies, and then were later replaced with others who did the same. But Mark E. Smith said they shouldn’t complain, that if past members were all so great then why hadn’t they done anything as great after they left. For Mark E. Smith, himself plus anyone was the Fall. Or as he once notoriously put it: “If it’s me and yer granny on bongos, it’s the Fall.”

I believe, or at least hope, that I’m a much gentler soul than Mark E. Smith was. (Or at least more Canadian. And I’m certain that I drink exponentially less.) But the evidence on the table shows that there are many who have worked with PME-ART in the past who no longer work with us. I certainly didn’t fire them, but perhaps there were some who wanted to continue further than they did. Or maybe, on the other hand, they really, really didn’t. I don’t actually know. Over the years there have not been many conversations along these lines. In one sense, this is simply our roots showing: we are structured like an (experimental) theatre company that works with creator/performers on a project-to-project basis. We invite people to work with us on a specific project and then see how it goes. But most of the work is so highly collaborative that this way of explaining the structure never feels completely right to me. I do gravitate toward the idea of “projects,” artistic endeavours with a beginning, middle, and end (as one can see from the way this book is structured). And, at times, I have also felt that me and anyone (and yer granny on bongos) is PME-ART. But most of the time I realize just how untrue this actually is.

(Perhaps all of this also reflects a decision semi-made all those years ago, after sitting in on the Forced Entertainment rehearsals, when I asked them if we should stick with the same people or open up to new collaborators. But it also seems to be a decision I am continuously making and unmaking. I can’t quite let it rest one way or the other.)

The story we tell in The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information about Pavement has to do with their final concert before they broke up (and also a few years before they once again reformed). The lead singer, Stephen Malkmus, walked onstage wearing handcuffs, holding his cuffed hands high above his head, and said: “If you want to know what it feels like to be in a band, this is what it feels like to be in a band.”

But there are also two stories about Pavement that I’ve never told in the show. The first is about how, after Pavement broke up, I read an interview with Malkmus in which he said that Pavement was basically all him: he wrote all the songs, wrote all the guitar parts, and often had to teach the rest of the band the songs several times before they were able to properly play them. (In their early days Pavement recorded a number of songs that were a bit too obviously influenced by the Fall.) Malkmus has now released a number of solo albums (some with his new band, the Jicks) that, in my humble opinion, are nowhere near as good as anything he made with Pavement. So the other members of Pavement clearly must have been contributing a great deal. (Also, to give Malkmus the benefit of the doubt, that was just one interview, maybe he was having a bad day.)

The second untold Pavement story is more apocryphal. I believe my favourite Pavement record is Wowee Zowee, made while they were still high off their first somewhat mainstream success, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and its single “Cut Your Hair.” Wowee Zowee was their most experimental and adventurous album, pushing in different directions with every track while still holding it all together. It was also a relative flop. And I feel they were overly stung by its reception. After that they were less likely to take risks, more likely to play it safe. Somehow I’ve had analogous experiences with PME-ART. Some of our most adventurous works (Unrehearsed Beauty-Le Génie des autres, HOSPITALITY 3: Individualism Was A Mistake) have also been the hardest to tour. I always need to push myself back toward taking artistic risks again. To remember that Wowee Zowee is still the best Pavement record and the world just needs to catch up.

These stories about Pavement and the Fall are perhaps ways for me to reflect on my different position within the group, within any given PME-ART creation process. How I am both one of the gang and the boss, and I suppose it’s not really possible to be both. And yet that is the struggle of the work. The ethical/artistic struggle that can never entirely be solved. Since, at the same time, I’m never only in charge. Within a PME-ART process it is always possible for me to be outvoted or to change course based on the desires of the group. It’s happened often. How to be transparent about my role within the collaborative dynamic? I often hate the lived experience of collaboration but somehow still so fiercely believe in it, knowing it would be so much better if it was the opposite: if I loved collaboration then I wouldn’t even particularly need to believe in it.

(Marie Claire writes that, yes, within PME-ART the leadership is pretty clear, even though it is subject to discussion. But also, it was only through her learning The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information that she came to understand just how much Claudia and Caroline hold and lead the work with me. For the HOSPITALITY/HOSPITALITÉ series, this has been absolutely true.)

The story about Parenthetical Girls is one we used to tell in the show but for some reason don’t anymore. When I saw the Parenthetical Girls play in Berlin there was one moment that will always stick with me. During a split-second pause in a song (I no longer remember which one) they all smoothly and effortlessly switched instruments. The drummer stepped over his drum kit and slid into the guitar strap that was held open for him, as the guitarist stepped over to the keyboard, the keyboard player was handed the bass, and the bass player sat down behind the drums without missing a beat. Or at least that’s how I remember it. This is also a story about collaboration, about those ecstatic moments when it really works, all the pieces sliding together without a hitch. I wonder how many times they had to rehearse it before it worked, or if it happened that smoothly every night. A moment of grace that can only be achieved through fully working together. (This actually isn’t the kind of thing I usually like in performance. Too virtuosic for my tastes. But in this case it caught me off guard and lodged in my memory accordingly.)

Another story about Parenthetical Girls. In 2016 I had a residency in their hometown of Portland, Oregon. And, while there, I would tell everyone I met that I loved the band. And everyone responded that they knew frontman Zac Pennington, or one of the other members, but no one had ever seen them live or listened to any of their records. (Parenthetical Girls put on a phenomenal live show.) As someone said to me: “Of course I know Zac. He’s really good at karaoke. Is his band any good?” As the French expression goes: you can never be a prophet in your own village.



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Some press we got for A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling

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Some press we got for A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines:

PME-ART: du difficile art d’être ensemble

L’Authenticité, un sentiment : mode d’emploi : Paradoxe sur un comédien

«L’authenticité, un sentiment: mode d’emploi»: l’art des possibles

L’homme qui n’aimait pas le théâtre

Adaptation: plus authentique que jamais

Critique. L’Authenticité, un sentiment: mode d’emploi. CISM




(Perhaps there is something slightly ironic in that all the press so far has been in French and the performance is entirely in English. But thus is my life here in Montreal.)

(And, of course, you can find the rest of the PME-ART links here.)



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Feature Friday

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Feature Friday: Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART



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