The interdisciplinary group PME-ART is dedicated to the creation of hybrid artistic objects with which people always engage in an authentic, singular manner. The ethical demands imposed by this approach, which aims to bring life into the works and art into human experience, has enriched the group’s practice for over 20 years.

PME-ART never turns away from paradox, drawing on it instead to supply the generous and unpredictable material of its work, where critical and poetic reflection mix together freely.

Bilingual since its founding, the Montreal-based group has since created a dozen projects that have appeared around the world, including En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize (1999), Le Génie des autres/Unrehearsed Beauty (2002), HOSPITALITY 3: Individualism Was a Mistake (2008), The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (2011) and Every Song I’ve Ever Written (2012).

A loosely defined group, PME-ART constantly seeks to refresh its practice through local, national, and international collaborations and is driven by the pursuit of a new form of representation that’s more collaborative and performative.

Jacob Wren, who steers PME-ART’s activities with a gentle hand, and Sylvie Lachance, artistic co-director, work within a prolific artistic community. As an author, Wren has written a number of acclaimed books. In 2018, he published Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART, which he adapted into the show A User’s Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling. Along with recounting the company’s fascinating journey, this work, which has been translated into French by Daniel Canty, represents a compelling contribution to the theory of performance.

Burcu Emeç is a performance maker and intimacy coordinator based between Montreal and Toronto. Originally trained as an actor, she works across the disciplines of live art, theatre, and film. Her approach to performance creation is heavily driven by images, and blends together social commentary, performativity, and non-acting. Burcu’s work has been presented in a variety of settings like theatres, galleries, conference rooms, and parks. Recent awards include the Mécènes investis pour les arts, OFFTA Hybridity Award, and five META nominations.

Claudia Fancello is a collaborative artist, creator, and performer based in Montreal. Since 2008, Claudia has co-created projects and toured with PME-ART interdisciplinary group.   She has been an integral part of choreographic collaborations and performances with artists Ame Henderson, Matija Ferlin, Justine A. Chambers, Stephen Thompson, Zoja Smutny and Marie Claire Forté. Alongside these adventures, Claudia participates in creations by developing concepts in costume design, artistic support and research. She also co-owns and operates Etna bar apéritif and Etna Pastificio in Montreal.

The relational, experiential and experimental potential of dance inspires me. I dance, choreograph, write, translate and teach. I am the mother of Imogen Keith; her presence is a force coursing through me. I create work and work with artists whom I love, recently including Louise Bédard, Katie Ward and PME-ART. I was Dancer in residence at l’Agora de la danse from 2017 to 2019. In 2016, my friend Sophie Bélair Clément and I created the exhibition project and bilingual publication – I’d rather something ambiguous. Mais précis à la fois. at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. From 2004 to 2008, I danced at the now-defunct Le Groupe Dance Lab in Ottawa, training daily with Peter Boneham.

Nadège Grebmeier Forget works in the field of contemporary art as an interdisciplinary artist, project coordinator, creative consultant and artistic director. Best known for her durational live and private performances, she builds a critical reflection on this medium by questioning its presentation devices, the issues of its documentation and the potential of its mediation. She has taken part in numerous events, festivals, conferences and residencies in Canada, Europe and the United States. She is the first performance artist to receive the Prix Pierre-Ayot (2019) from the City of Montreal, awarded in partnership with the Association of Contemporary Art Galleries (AGAC).

Adam Kinner is an artist based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, originally from the area around Washington, DC. He works provisionally and across forms, taking a research-based, improvisatory and collaborative approach, often working with artists from dance and music. His work takes the form of concerts, writing, exhibitions, stage works, and in situ performance. Recent projects have been shown at the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, the Art Gallery of York University, and Suoni Per Il Popolo. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently learning to make clothing.

Catherine Lalonde is a poet, spoken word artist, and journalist. Among her four published books, La dévoration des fées (Quartanier), was awarded le prix Alain-Granbois de l’Académie des lettres du Québec and was a finalist for a 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award. Corps étranger (Quartanier) won the Émile Nelligan Award in 2008. Having trained at the Ateliers de danse moderne de Montréal, she has danced with Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault, Marie Claire Forté, Lin Snelling, Guy Cools and Jean-François Boisvenue. Lalonde also works as a journalist for the Montréal daily Le Devoir.

Ashlea Watkin is an Occupational Therapist based on Vancouver Island with deep roots in movement education and performance. She has performed across Canada and in France.  In 2014, she collaborated with PME-ART for the creation of, Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie. Ashlea’s interests are rooted in individual and collective practices of studying, observing, sensing, and embodiment. As a performer she is curious about opportunities that displace her out of her comfort zone to expand her sense of connection – to self, place, and other.

Jacob Wren makes literature, performances and exhibitions. His books include: Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART (2018), Rich and Poor (2016), Polyamorous Love Song (2014), Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (2010), Families Are Formed Through Copulation (2007), Unrehearsed Beauty (1998).

As artistic codirector with Sylvie Lachance of the Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART, he has co-created performances such as: A User’s Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling (2018), Every Song I’ve Ever Written (2012), The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (2011), Individualism Was A Mistake (2008). Most recently with PME-ART, he has co-organized the online conference Vulnerable Paradoxes (2020) and the related free PDF publication In response to Vulnerable Paradoxes (2021). His internet presence is often defined by a fondness for quotations.

The project Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition raises fascinating questions about our relationship to art. According to you, what questions does it ask of literature?

Sylvie Lachance: Our work reflects our very open vision of what a work of art is. For us, no artist and no work are perfect or untouchable. We also want to explore how literature belongs to everyone and not only to specialists. The artists in the project come from different practices including literature, performance, dance, theatre and music, and have different relationships to literary writing and publishing.

Jacob Wren: The director Andrei Tarkovsky once said that if a book is read by a million people, it becomes a million different books. For me, the process of rewriting that we’re pursuing in this project evokes, in a manner at once literal and playful, how literature enters our lives, always in a new way, never fixed. It also conveys the engagement prompted by a text: when you love a book, it becomes part of you and changes with you.

Collaborative work and the adjustments it requires are part of PME-ART’s DNA. Tell us about the friction between the group and the individual in your work.

J.W.: One thing that inevitably seems true to me, even if I sometimes have a little difficulty conceptualizing it, is that the group cannot exist without the individuals and the individuals cannot exist without the group. In a sense, all our artistic activities are an attempt to not water down the singularity of the artists for the sake of collaboration. Together, we try to figure out how to create a space where the desires, the idiosyncrasies, the obsessions of each individual can co-exist and even generate a shared meaning.

When there are irreconcilable elements within the group, you have to find the best solutions. There’s a negotiation, maybe even a compromise—although most often, we want to make as few compromises as possible! You could say that our approach consists of inventing a common framework in which each person’s individuality can exist. It’s a way of having your cake and eating it too!

S.L.: That’s all the more true because we work with artists from extremely diverse backgrounds who each have their own artistic vision and approach. That makes the process even more fraught and ultimately more rewarding.

The premise of this performance-installation was created in 2014 at the invitation of Michèle Thériault, director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen art gallery. Almost eight years later, how has this new performance at the FTA enabled you to rethink it?

J.W.: During the piece’s creation, we worked from a different book and the project was called Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie instead. When we started working on it again, one of us proposed that we try changing the text. That idea immediately appealed to us, and we realized that the subject of our piece is not the literary work itself but rather the process of rewriting it and performing it. We don’t want to glorify one artist in particular. What really drives us is the artistic engagement toward literature.

All the group’s members then proposed a work to rewrite and we tried out each one. Through this process, we first eliminated one book, then another, and at the end there was only one left, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag.

Why did you decide on the first book in Susan Sontag’s three volumes of diaries? And how will you approach rewriting it?

J.W.: It was a fairly instinctive decision, and I still can’t explain it very well. We found Sontag’s journal very touching, and we were all struck by the fact that it possesses a kind of immediacy and a remarkable openness. I think the process of rewriting this work will be what enables us to really understand why we chose to rewrite it.

The goal is to make the book “a little more collective and a little closer to us.” What that means, of course, is that we will transform the text through the collaborative nature of our rewriting. The fact that the rewriting is happening now is also very important. Sontag wrote her journals over fifty years ago; we’re different from who we might have been in that era. Working to bring something from the past into the present constantly motivates us in our work of rewriting.

PME-ART describe their performance as an act of rewriting Sontag’s journals. They see this as guided by exchange among them as performers along with an understanding of reading as an active, open, and generative process. How would you define rewriting in comparison to copying? What questions does rewriting bring to authorship? What is the status of rewritten work?

Private journals are written for the author alone, and are, at least initially, readerless texts. In this performance, an individual voice is distributed among multiple performers. How do you see PME-ART negotiating intimacy and privacy? When reading the pages collected on the wall shelf, where do you recognize Sontag’s words, and where do you sense the performers’ inflections?

The process and layout of this performance match another presented eight years ago. Many of the performers are the same too. At play alongside collective rewriting is the citation and retracing of this past performance. Where among these echoes do you find yourself as a spectator and reader? How might you incorporate echoing, mirroring, and returning into the ways you navigate the performance?

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” in Image, Music, Text, 142-148. Translated from the French by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977.

Fox, Nicholas Hengen. Reading as Collective Action: Texts as Tactics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated from the German by Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge, 2006.

Pearce, Lynne. Feminism and the Politics of Reading, London:  Arnold, 1997.

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated from the French by Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2011.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Dell, 1969.

Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

Wren, Jacob. Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART. Toronto: Book*hug, 2018.

pme-art.ca

fta.ca

Creation, Performance and Installation: Burcu Emeç + Marie Claire Forté + Nadège Grebmeier Forget + Adam Kinner + Catherine Lalonde + Ashlea Watkin + Jacob Wren

Artistic contribution: Claudia Fancello

Text: Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963 © The Estate of Susan Sontag (2008) used by permission of The Wylie Agency (Royaume-Uni) + Renaître : journaux et carnets (1947-1963)translated from English (United States) by Anne Wicke © Christian Bourgois Éditeur (2010)

Artistic Coordinator: Sylvie Lachance

Production Advisor: Lynda Gaudreau

Administrative Coordinator: Richard Ducharme

Co-produced by Festival TransAmériques + Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery Co-presented by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery

Interview and PME-ART profile : Sara Fauteux, translation by David Dalgleish