A User’s Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling

2018 marks twenty years of PME-ART. To celebrate, co-artistic director Jacob Wren is writing a book entitled Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART, a book he describes as “a compelling hybrid of history, memoir and performance theory.” But books about performance never feel quite right, or at least never feel like enough on their own. Addressing performance requires performance. Therefore, we are also creating an accompanying work entitled A User’s Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling. It is an artist talk turned inside out, an artist talk that tells more about artistic struggles and challenges than about any worldly success. This performance will also document the reactions all of PME-ART’s past and current collaborators had to the book. What they agreed with and what they found unfair, demonstrating how our shared artistic history creates collaborative dynamics that are complex. This performance asks: 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.