.
Actually, I am for going. Yet I have to question again and again – who goes, how and why. I am for a different kind of going than the conventional touring routine: taxi, plane, hotel, venue, hotel, plane, taxi… I am for going slowly, going with care, going to stay, explore, connect, going to create conditions for the artwork to live longer, not going, going with dignity, letting someone else go. What are alternatives to travel fatigue – a condition discussed frequently within the “bubble” of Western theatre makers? To stop and find well-articulated reasons for not travelling anymore as we are privileged to do so? But we could as well give chance to new approaches to emerge, we could keep exploring and connecting things, places, people and ideas without necessarily going or – if going – then differently.
- Gundega Laiviņa, as cited in Showing Without Going: Interview with Ant Hampton
.
January 21, 2023
January 19, 2023
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:
*
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.
*
You can find the review here. And of course you can find Authenticity is a Feeling here.
.
*
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.
*
You can find the review here. And of course you can find Authenticity is a Feeling here.
.
January 18, 2023
Some passages from What Love Looks Like
Some passages from What Love Looks Like: A Conversation with Tim DeChristopher by Terry Tempest Williams:
*
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: A while back I was reading Albert Schweitzer’s book on historical Jesus. Do you see Jesus as a historical figure in terms of leadership?
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I do view him as an example of a revolutionary leader.
TERRY: How?
TIM: Well, he was saying very challenging things both to the people who were following him and to the dominant culture at the time. And it led to some radical changes in the way people were living and the way people were structuring society.
TERRY: What would you view as the most radical of his teachings?
TIM: Turning the other cheek, I think, is one extremely radical thing. That, I think, is his powerful message about civil disobedience. And the other, which might be even more radical, is letting go of material wealth. That’s so radical that Christians today still can’t talk about it. I mean, he said it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven. And he told his followers to drop what they had, to let go of their jobs, to let go of their material possessions. Even let go of their families. If they wanted to follow him, they had to let go of everything they were holding onto, all the things that brought them security in life. They had to be insecure. That’s pretty radical.
*
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: In personal terms, your life has been in limbo for the last two years. And that’s my word, not yours. But is it fair to say you haven’t known what your future is going to be? Because you didn’t know when you were going to go to trial, or whether you’d be convicted. How has that felt?
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: I think part of what empowered me to take that leap and have that insecurity was that I already felt that insecurity. I didn’t know what my future was going to be. My future was already lost.
TERRY: Coming out of college?
TIM: No. Realizing how fucked we are in our future.
TERRY: In terms of climate change.
TIM: Yeah. I met Terry Root, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, at the Stegner Symposium at the University of Utah. She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterwards and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some things we could have done in the ’90s — but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.
TERRY: When was this?
TIM: This was in March of 2008. And I said, “You just gave a speech to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the truth, people would just give up.” And I talked to her a couple years later, and she’s still not telling people the truth. But with me, it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future — of a career and a retirement and all that stuff — I realized that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.
*
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Here’s an idea that I want to know what you think of: Laurance Rockefeller, as you know, came from a family of great privilege, and he was a conservationist. And in his nineties, he informed his family that the JY Ranch — the piece of land in Grand Teton National Park that his father, John D. Rockefeller, set aside for his family — would be returned to the American people. This was a vow he had made to his father. And he was going to “rewild it” — remove the dozens of cabins from the land and place them elsewhere. Well, you can imagine the response from his family. Shocked. Heartsick. Not pleased. But he did it anyway, and he did it with great spiritual resolve and intention. He died shortly after. I was asked to write about this story, so I wanted to visit his office to see what he looked out at when he was working in New York. Everything had been cleared out, except for scales and Buddhas. That was all that was in there. I was so struck by that. And his secretary said, “I think you would be interested in this piece of writing.” And she disappeared and she came back, and this is what she handed me: [Reading] “I love the concept of unity and diversity. Most decisions are based on a tiny difference. People say, ‘This was right, that was wrong’; the difference was a feather. I keep scales wherever I am to remind me of that. They’re a symbol of my awareness. Of the distortion most people have of what is better and what is not.” How would you respond to that? The key sentence, I think, is, “The difference was a feather.”
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, the difference is a feather. I guess that’s why I believe that we can be powerful as individuals. Why we actually can make a difference. The status quo is this balance that we have right now. And if we shift ourselves, we shift that scale. I remember one of the big things that pushed me over the edge before the auction was Naomi Klein’s speech that she gave at Bioneers in November of 2008. She was talking about Obama, and talking about where he was at with climate change, and the things he was throwing out there as campaign promises, you know, the best things he was offering. And she was talking about how that’s nowhere near enough. That even his pie-in-the-sky campaign promises were not enough. And she talked about how, ultimately, Obama was a centrist. That he found the center and he went there. And that that’s where his power came from. She said, “And that’s not gonna change.” And so if the center is not good enough for our survival, and if Obama is a centrist, and will always be a centrist, then our job is to move the center. And that’s what she ended the speech with: “Our job is to move the center.” And it was so powerful that we actually got the video as soon as we could and replayed it at the Unitarian church in Salt Lake, and had this event one evening where we played that speech and then broke up into groups and talked about what it meant to move the center. And what I came away from that with was the realization that you can’t move the center from the center. That if you want to shift the balance — if you want to tilt that scale — you have to go to the edge and push. You have to go beyond what people consider to be reasonable, and push.
*
Read the entire interview here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/what-love-looks-like
.
*
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: A while back I was reading Albert Schweitzer’s book on historical Jesus. Do you see Jesus as a historical figure in terms of leadership?
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I do view him as an example of a revolutionary leader.
TERRY: How?
TIM: Well, he was saying very challenging things both to the people who were following him and to the dominant culture at the time. And it led to some radical changes in the way people were living and the way people were structuring society.
TERRY: What would you view as the most radical of his teachings?
TIM: Turning the other cheek, I think, is one extremely radical thing. That, I think, is his powerful message about civil disobedience. And the other, which might be even more radical, is letting go of material wealth. That’s so radical that Christians today still can’t talk about it. I mean, he said it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven. And he told his followers to drop what they had, to let go of their jobs, to let go of their material possessions. Even let go of their families. If they wanted to follow him, they had to let go of everything they were holding onto, all the things that brought them security in life. They had to be insecure. That’s pretty radical.
*
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: In personal terms, your life has been in limbo for the last two years. And that’s my word, not yours. But is it fair to say you haven’t known what your future is going to be? Because you didn’t know when you were going to go to trial, or whether you’d be convicted. How has that felt?
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: I think part of what empowered me to take that leap and have that insecurity was that I already felt that insecurity. I didn’t know what my future was going to be. My future was already lost.
TERRY: Coming out of college?
TIM: No. Realizing how fucked we are in our future.
TERRY: In terms of climate change.
TIM: Yeah. I met Terry Root, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, at the Stegner Symposium at the University of Utah. She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterwards and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some things we could have done in the ’90s — but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.
TERRY: When was this?
TIM: This was in March of 2008. And I said, “You just gave a speech to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the truth, people would just give up.” And I talked to her a couple years later, and she’s still not telling people the truth. But with me, it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future — of a career and a retirement and all that stuff — I realized that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.
*
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Here’s an idea that I want to know what you think of: Laurance Rockefeller, as you know, came from a family of great privilege, and he was a conservationist. And in his nineties, he informed his family that the JY Ranch — the piece of land in Grand Teton National Park that his father, John D. Rockefeller, set aside for his family — would be returned to the American people. This was a vow he had made to his father. And he was going to “rewild it” — remove the dozens of cabins from the land and place them elsewhere. Well, you can imagine the response from his family. Shocked. Heartsick. Not pleased. But he did it anyway, and he did it with great spiritual resolve and intention. He died shortly after. I was asked to write about this story, so I wanted to visit his office to see what he looked out at when he was working in New York. Everything had been cleared out, except for scales and Buddhas. That was all that was in there. I was so struck by that. And his secretary said, “I think you would be interested in this piece of writing.” And she disappeared and she came back, and this is what she handed me: [Reading] “I love the concept of unity and diversity. Most decisions are based on a tiny difference. People say, ‘This was right, that was wrong’; the difference was a feather. I keep scales wherever I am to remind me of that. They’re a symbol of my awareness. Of the distortion most people have of what is better and what is not.” How would you respond to that? The key sentence, I think, is, “The difference was a feather.”
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, the difference is a feather. I guess that’s why I believe that we can be powerful as individuals. Why we actually can make a difference. The status quo is this balance that we have right now. And if we shift ourselves, we shift that scale. I remember one of the big things that pushed me over the edge before the auction was Naomi Klein’s speech that she gave at Bioneers in November of 2008. She was talking about Obama, and talking about where he was at with climate change, and the things he was throwing out there as campaign promises, you know, the best things he was offering. And she was talking about how that’s nowhere near enough. That even his pie-in-the-sky campaign promises were not enough. And she talked about how, ultimately, Obama was a centrist. That he found the center and he went there. And that that’s where his power came from. She said, “And that’s not gonna change.” And so if the center is not good enough for our survival, and if Obama is a centrist, and will always be a centrist, then our job is to move the center. And that’s what she ended the speech with: “Our job is to move the center.” And it was so powerful that we actually got the video as soon as we could and replayed it at the Unitarian church in Salt Lake, and had this event one evening where we played that speech and then broke up into groups and talked about what it meant to move the center. And what I came away from that with was the realization that you can’t move the center from the center. That if you want to shift the balance — if you want to tilt that scale — you have to go to the edge and push. You have to go beyond what people consider to be reasonable, and push.
*
Read the entire interview here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/what-love-looks-like
.
January 3, 2023
I Love Dick meets All That Jazz
.
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
.
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
.
January 2, 2023
I was at a dinner party a few years ago...
.
I was at a dinner party a few years ago. Everyone there is an artist of some sort. And all the conversations are about TV series. And every time a new series is mentioned someone asks me if I’ve seen it and I say I haven’t. And, at some point, someone asks me: if I don’t watch any television than what do I do? And I say that I mostly read. And they then go around the table and everyone says that they can’t remember the last time they read a book. And I say: that’s what every writer loves to hear and everyone laughs.
.
I was at a dinner party a few years ago. Everyone there is an artist of some sort. And all the conversations are about TV series. And every time a new series is mentioned someone asks me if I’ve seen it and I say I haven’t. And, at some point, someone asks me: if I don’t watch any television than what do I do? And I say that I mostly read. And they then go around the table and everyone says that they can’t remember the last time they read a book. And I say: that’s what every writer loves to hear and everyone laughs.
.
December 27, 2022
Bela Shayevich writing about Camp Migizi
.
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
.
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
.
December 22, 2022
PME-ART in 2022
.
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.
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December 8, 2022
Nine Tumblr posts that have gone viral.
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I think so far - more or less - I've had nine Tumblr posts that have gone viral:
This Cory Doctorow quote that begins: “But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money...”
This photo of the Orpheus Mosaic before conservation at Paphos, Cyprus
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 16,063 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 16,063 times. The addict has a need to confess. )
.
I think so far - more or less - I've had nine Tumblr posts that have gone viral:
This Cory Doctorow quote that begins: “But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money...”
This photo of the Orpheus Mosaic before conservation at Paphos, Cyprus
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 16,063 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 16,063 times. The addict has a need to confess. )
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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October 2, 2022
a rather specific yet vague and intense fantasy
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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.)
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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.)
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
.
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