Tix.is
Event info

PME Art / JACOB WRÉN (CA) - A User’s Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling

To celebrate twenty years of PME-ART, co-artistic director Jacob Wren wrote a book entitled "Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART", a compelling hybrid of history, memoir and performance theory. But books about performance never feel like enough on their own. Addressing performance requires performance. Therefore we also created A User’s Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling. An artist talk turned inside out, a performance asking: why do we do it, why do we continue to believe so stubbornly in the fragile but essential act of “being yourself in a performance situation,” and how do we continue to hope against hope that our destabilizing tangle of art and politics might still, in some small way, change the world. The show also documents the reactions of PME-ART’s past and current collaborators. What they agreed with and what they found unfair, demonstrating that collaborative dynamics are always complex.


A lecture-performance by Jacob Wren, with the explicit or implicit contributions from PME-ART’s collaborators

Costumes: Claudia Fancello

Lighting: Paul Chambers

Production & Technical Manager: Nikita Bala

Production: PME-ART (Montréal) Co-production: FTT (Düsseldorf), supported within the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Inkonst (Malmö), and with the support of La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines (Montréal), the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and The Canada Council for the Arts.


The work of PME-ART examines the performance situation with considerable openness to both artistic co-creators and audience. PME-ART has presented in more than fifty cities in Quebec, Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States, including the ICA (London, 2000), Kaaitheater (Brussels, 2006), Festival Spielart (Munich, 2015), and Kiasma (Helsinki, 2016). PME-ART has also participated in the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal’s Triennale Québécoise (2011) and La Biennale de Montréal (2016). Past creations and achievements include the performances Every Song I’ve Ever Written, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information, and HOSPITALITY 3: Individualism Was a Mistake. PME-ART was nominated for the 27th Conseil des arts de Montréal’s Grand-Prix (New Artistic Practices) in 2012.


For further information: http://www.pme-art.ca/en/ & http://www.spectacular.is/jacob-wren