Authenticity is a Feeling Quotes

“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.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“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.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“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.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“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.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“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.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“The work of PME-ART is highly collaborative and is also very much about collaboration, about people working together, trying to negotiate what is meaningful to them, where and how they disagree, and how such agreements and disagreements might be evocatively conveyed. Collaboration is definitely not easy. As a teenager in Toronto I would see many one-person shows and think the reason there is only one person onstage has little to do with art and much to do with economics. I would see many shows where the people onstage felt like employees primarily doing what they had been told. Instead I wanted to see people onstage doing what they wanted to do, and felt that this wanting should include active, alive ways of working together.

However, looking back over the past twenty years, I also have to admit that I’m not completely sure collaboration is the place for me. It seems I am temperamentally ill-suited for it. Twenty years of doing something I’m ill-suited for and justifying it to myself through compelling artistic results. (This book is in many ways the story of this struggle.) Because though collaboration has never felt good, I still believe in it. Perhaps I believe in it even more because I find it so difficult. Perhaps I believe in it too much. We are all here on this planet, in our various societies and communities, and like it or not we must find ways to work together. The fact that it is often not easy makes it all that much more necessary.

I sometimes wonder if over the years I have over-relied on the metaphor of the collaborative process as microcosm for various global-political realities. It must be a way for me to feel that what I’m doing is more important than it actually is. I think this might be true of all art. Art is a place where the artist feels what they are doing is more important than it actually is. I sincerely wonder if we’ll make it another twenty years.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART