Jacob Wren, Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

 

My performance work has been a search for authenticity, but I don’t think authenticity is something that exist. A work of art cannot be authentic, it can only feel authentic for certain people at certain times. Which is to say that, for me, authenticity is a feeling and about what we feel. In much the same way one might feel sad or feel joy, one can feel something to be authentic. It is a word that suggests engagement and connection. If you feel that Beyoncé is authentic and I don’t, this simply means that for you Beyoncé is authentic and for me less so. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything about Beyoncé. However, what works of art we feel to be authentic can also tell us a great deal about how we see things, what we value, and can at times also potentially change how we see and feel about the world that surrounds us.

I’m behind on everything, but finally working my way through writer and “maker of eccentric performances” Jacob Wren’s Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2018), composed as a combination of criticism, first-person reportage and archive, surrounding the first two decades of his participation in PME-ART, the collaborative interdisciplinary collective he helped found in Montreal. Moving from storytelling, lingering doubt, alternate voices and blistering self-critique, he writes of a growing disillusionment after a decade of working in Toronto, prompting him to head into Montreal, and starting the beginnings of a sequence of connections, collaborations, conversations and conflicts that opened up a wealth of writing, performance and possibility for both him and his work. “I have always been interested in what it means to stand in front of a room full of people, often strangers, who are watching you, and to do so with as little armouring as possible, not hiding the fact that the situation is potentially unnerving or even nerve-racking, being as vulnerable as possible without turning vulnerability into any kind of drama or crutch. I often say that I personally find performing to be humiliating, and do my best, while performing, not to conceal this aspect of my experience. I often wonder why I have spent the past thirty years of my life obsessively working on this particular question and practice. Perhaps it is only because it is a kind of impossible undertaking, always leaving me artistically destabilized and therefore always leaving me wanting more.”

If you aren’t aware of Jacob Wren, he’s the author of a mound of award-winning novels and plays, including Unrehearsed Beauty (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1998), Families are Formed Through Copulation (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2005), Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (Pedlar Press, 2010), Polyamorous Love Song (finalist for the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and a Globe and Mail best book of 2014; Book*hug Press, 2014); Rich and Poor (finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a Globe and Mail best book of 2016; Book*hug Press, 2016) and the new novel, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (Book*hug Press, 2024), out any minute now. There’s something really fascinating in how Wren composed this recollection, offering his take on certain situations, collaborations and performances, as well as allowing a number of his collaborators their own opportunities to offer their own perspectives, after reading through an early draft of the manuscript. Working from within the very idea of collaboration, Wren doesn’t wish his to be the only perspective, certainly. If you don’t know where else to begin with the work of Jacob Wren, this might be the perfect point.

I have been making performances and literature for almost thirty years and, despite or perhaps because of my incessant doubts, I apparently have not quit. I constantly wonder what keeps me going. In one sense I feel that when you’re an artist the only way to keep going is to believe you have no choice. Believing one has no choice is also a form of privilege.

 

new from above/ground press : Smith + Hall, eleftherion, Wren, Ebbitt, Deutch, Flemmer, Smith, carisse, Ballard, Burnham + The Peter F Yacht Club/VERSeFest Special,

; The Green Rose, in collaboration, Steven Ross Smith + Phil Hall $6 ; The Peter F Yacht Club #33/2024 VERSeFest Special, lovingly hand-crafted, folded, stapled, edited and carried around in bags of envelopes by rob mclennan $6 ; abject sutures, melissa eleftherion $5 ; From Desire Without Expectation, Jacob Wren $5 ; HYSTERICAL PREGNANCY, Katie Ebbitt $5 ; new york ironweed, Amanda Deutch $5 ; Alternate histories, Kyle Flemmer $5 ; Some Failed Eternity, Pete Smith $5 ; In The Margins. . . . . .of french translations found and remixed by russell carisse, russell carisse $5 ; BUSY SECRET, Micah Ballard $5 ; The Old Man: new stories, Clint Burnham $5 ;

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material; see the previous batch of backlist from January-February 2024 here; and don't forget that Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] is still in the midst of a tenth anniversary sale!

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February-March 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each
and there's still time to subscribe for 2024! (easily backdated,

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by ryan fitzpatrick, Mckenzie Strath, Kacper Bartczak (trans. by Mark Tardi), John Levy, alex benedict, Helen Hajnoczky, Ryan Skrabalak, Hope Anderson, MAC Farrant, Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Sacha Archer, Dale Tracy, Saba Pakdel, Peter Myers, Terri Witek and David Phillips (among others, most likely); what else might 2024 bring?

Ploughshares : an interview with Jacob Wren

I'm a monthly blogger over at the Ploughshares blog! And my thirteenth post is now up: an interview with Montreal writer Jacob Wren.

You can see links to all of my Ploughshares posts here, including interviews with Toronto poet Marcus McCann, founder/editor Robin Richardson on Minola Review: a journal of women's writing, Toronto poet Emily Izsak, Ottawa poet Faizal Deen, Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke, editor/critic Erin Wunker, Arc Poetry Magazine Poetry Editor Rhonda Douglas, editor/publisher Leigh Nash on Invisible Publishing, Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor, fiction writer and small press publisher Stuart Ross, Toronto novelist Ken Sparling, Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen and Toronto poet Soraya Peerbaye.

Jacob Wren, If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates

If love is power, a kind of soft power, it is also true that real power, the kind that makes the job possible, can only operate in secret. When you show your hand you also weaken it. A secret, even when revealed, undermines all certainty, since there might well be more destabilizing secrets to come. I am confident. I will prevail, I know I will prevail, for if I lose their love, if the job crumbles, I have at the very least succeeded in weakening their resolve. I have created suspicions where before there was mainly trust. Then we all know what will occur. It will only take a moment before I completely disappear. (“The Infiltrator”)

Originally produced in a limited run for “Authors for Indies Day,” May 2, 2015, Jacob Wren’s small collection of two short stories and an essay, If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy ofpirates (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2015), explores the nature and purpose of art, and a search for meaning through daily and ongoing activity. In the story, “Four Letters from an Ongoing Series,” the narrator, a writer, moves through the normal course of a series of days to return home to yet another rejection letter, and wonders exactly what the point of it all might be. The collection ends with the essay “Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith: Notes on art, meaning, emptiness and spirituality,” that begins:

IS IT TRUE THAT TODAY, in casual conversation, artists often speak about wanting to have a career, but rarely speak about wanting to make something meaningful? Or is this casual observation only my cynicism rising to the surface? In the most general sense, the hope that art can be meaningful in people’s lives brings it very close to the spiritual, and this might be one of the many reasons the topic is often avoided. If I say I want a career (which, of course, I do as much as any artist) I might come across as ambitious, but there is also something practical and down-to-earth in my pronouncement. If I say I want to make something meaningful it is a higher style of arrogance, more old fashioned, less critical and therefore less contemporary. The desire to make something meaningful brings along with it a thousand small distastes and taboos.

Wren’s ongoing work, including the novels Unrehearsed Beauty (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1998), Families are Formed Through Copulation (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2007), Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (Pedlar Press, 2010) and Polyamorous Love Song (BookThug, 2014), often explore how to live a meaningful and productive life, loneliness and solitude, the purpose of art, and a series of intimate human interactions, articulated both through a cynical, yet furiously optimistic, and even innocent, open gaze. Wren routinely prods at a series of very large and human questions on just how it is we should and could be moving through the world in a positive and productive way, highlighting just how complicated such uncomplicated it actually is. Listen to the narrator of the story “Four Letters from an Ongoing Series,” for example, after reading a scathing critique of a rejected manuscript:

I lie in bed filled with doubts of every kind. And yet, if I’m honest with myself, I strangely don’t doubt my work all that much. I have to write the books I have to write. If every single publisher in the world thinks they’re shit then so be it. Of course it feels bad now but I’m sure I’ve seen worse and perhaps there is even worse to come. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is being tortured and someone else is being bombed. How much do a few pages of critical words directed at me really hurt when stacked up against even a sliver of the horrors possible in the world? I’m going to keep writing books, I try to tell myself, no sure I’m still completely awake or if I’m already drifting off to sleep. And if not, maybe it’s still not too late to find some other thing to do with my life.

And for those who missed out on the short run of this title, apparently BookThug is producing more copies soon, claiming that orders keep coming in. There is still hope.

Fence magazine #29 (spring-summer 2014)

SECOND LANGUAGE INTERFERENCE

When learning a third language, one often accidentally uses the second tongue, even if it’s barely rooted. In that moment of interference—there is a box in the mind that springs open. occupied. Two spiders per web. The dark matter of conflict. There is a shifting, making space for the stranger getting onto your subway car. You are a subway car. Or the language is in you like a mind. (Jennifer Kronovet)

By now, you’ve most likely figured out that one of my favourite American literary journals is Fence magazine, and their most recent issue recently arrived at my door: Fence magazine #29 (spring-summer 2014). I have to say I was charmed by Trey Sager’s editor’s note at the opening of the issue, titled only “EDITOR,” in which he discusses the process of a small handful of editors with varied tastes and biases, working together to produce various issues. The piece ends with:

Our conversations about what we want to publish have included shared enthusiasms and interests in work from different categories spanning (at minimum) race, age, sexuality, gender, class, level of artistic success, languages, and aesthetics, and how to find stories therein that are challenging and new and explosive and relevant. But I’ve also come to a temporary conclusion that a roster of diverse stories is what’s most important to me. Why? Because that means we’re reading stories on their own terms, that we’re not beholden to a reductive or singular idea of what “high quality” is. I also believe that a diverse group of stories necessarily results in a diverse group of authors. As a democracy, the give Fence fiction editors are each other’s fail-safes. We help check each other’s underlying motives. The subconscious is some deep shit.

Probably ours is not a perfect system, but the latest result is the fiction in this issue, a diamond of a gamut. More or less I’m still following the same Sherpa as before, only now he’s wearing an Iron Maiden tee and quotes Charles Olson, “Limits / are what any of us / are inside of.” Where’s he taking us? Up the mountain, of course.

Everybody carries some water.

Part of that broad scopes includes the caveat that, once published in an issue of the semi-annual Fence, that same author can’t submit again for two years, providing any reader the opportunity to discover at least a couple of very interesting authors previously unknown in every issue. I’m always happy to see new work by Brian Kim Stefans, Jenny Zhang, Evie Shockley, Cara Benson, Jacob Wren, John Pluecker, Sampson Starkweather, Barry Schwabsky, Katie L. Price and Laura Mullen, for example, but was also quite pleased to be able to discover the works of writers such as Dawn Marie Knopf, Jennifer Kronovet and Sandra Simonds; Simonds’ sequence, “The Lake Ella Variations” is worth the price of admission alone. A fragment of the thirteen part sequence reads: “The song of the lake and the song of the human / make / the electric chair. // The song of the hand and the syringe / make / the bread-maker. // The song of the wheat flour and sticker-book / make / the bed.” Sager makes the case for a strong array of fiction in each issue, but it is always the poetry that strikes me first (perhaps my own bias is simply coming through). It is through journals such as Fence that make me optimistic of the state of literary culture, and some of the possibilities of the poem, opening every issue to a series of striking short lyric poems and/or sequences, such as this, the opening of Dawn Marie Knopf’s sequence, “selections from THE ARIAL CRITIQUES”:

The boundary gathers all along the length of the same. If I recollect with any

accuracy I felt it just after we passed the Interstate Shield but you likely dumbed

down the controls for my sake, my simple mind. One side is on this side

and one side is on the other side. To cross Stateline is to re-establish

our conversation. Over our second course in the third town in the great land

Perpetua I continue with what I saw.

12 or 20 questions: with Jacob Wren


Jacob Wren is a writer and theatre director who divides his time between Toronto and Montreal. Recent published books include: Unrehearsed Beauty (Coach House Books) and Families Are Formed Through Copulation (Pedlar Press.) As well, he is currently working on a novel entitled Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. Over the next three years, all three of these books will be translated into French and published by Le Quartanier in Quebec. He also writes about contemporary visual art for C Magazine. In theatre, he co-founded Candid Stammer Theatre in Toronto in 1988 and in 2002 became co-artistic director of the Montreal-based theatre company PME. His performance work attempts to find ways of speaking to the audience casually – through both words and movement – that are ironic and sincere in acknowledging the fact that communication is often uncomfortable. In recent years, he has also frequently chosen to work in languages he doesn’t speak or understand (French, Norwegian, German) in order to give the performers a greater degree of autonomy over their own performances. Within PME he has created En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize (1998), Unrehearsed Beauty / Le Génie des autres (2002) and Families Are Formed Through Copulation (2005). During the same period he also collaborated with Nadia Ross and her company STO Union. Together they have co-written and co-directed Recent Experiences (2000) and Revolutions in Therapy (2004). In 2007 he was commissioned by Sophiensæle in Berlin to direct his own stage adaptation of the 1954 German novel Der Tod in Rom by Wolfgang Koeppen. Jacob’s performance and theatre works have been seen in Norway, the Czech Republic, Germany, Portugal, France, England, Wales, Scotland, Croatia, Sweden, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Hong Kong, Japan, Ireland and the Netherlands as well as in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Calgary, Quebec City, Halifax and Montreal. His theatre texts have been translated into French, Dutch, German, Norwegian and Japanese.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My first book was My Tongue, My Teeth, Your Voice in 1992. At the time I was 21 and working under the pseudonym Death Waits (a fact I sometimes now regret though I suppose it was all in good fun.) I feel, in some ways, that first book (and the stupid pseudonym that went along with it) got more attention then anything I have done since, or at least a fair bit of attention for a book of poetry at that time. In some ways that book, along with the considerably publicity I got for some of the theatre projects I was also doing at that time, has made me feel that everything I have done since is a bit of a failure. (Perhaps an experience akin to ‘child star syndrome.’) I received a little bit of heat just out of the gate and it’s been a long, cold road ever since. But I suppose all of that might still change…

2 - How long have you lived in Montreal, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I have been working in Montreal pretty consistently for the past ten years and have been living there more or less full time for the past five or six years. Since I don’t understand or speak French, while at the same time serving as the Co-Artistic Director for the French theatre company PME (it seems I always like to do things the easy way), the language aspect of Montreal has played a considerable role in my recent theatre practice. Working in a language I don’t speak or understand as a method for activating other, more emancipatory, forms of collaboration has been one consistent thematic and theoretical interest over the past ten years, and a question I have continued to explore in Norway and more recently Germany. Montreal is such a warmly charming city and yet it is clear that I will never really feel at home there. In this sense it gives me a tacked-on, artificial - but still somehow convincing - explanation for the deep sense of almost pernicious alienation that I have in fact felt wherever I have lived. An alienation that in many ways is the engine of my practice. I have also worked in Europe a great deal over the past eight years and the more aggressive, critical style they have there when speaking about art has done a great deal to help me overcome some aspects of my gentle Canadian nature. Perhaps the past few overly-Adorno-influenced summers spent in Berlin have also done their part in increasing my life long generalized sense of negativity.

3 - Where does a play or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Each project begins from a question, idea or title. I am always working on a book from the beginning. I find it almost impossible to complete anything if I don’t have a deadline. Usually I will hold a question, idea or title quietly in the back of my mind for several years before actually beginning to work on it. If it is something that stays with me then I figure it is probably worth dedicating a few years of my life towards.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

There is something deeply melancholy for me about a public reading. I always feel the audience (which of course mainly consists of other writers) would prefer to be at home watching a DVD, or at the very least be left to their drinking in peace. I don’t see any great benefit for my creative process but it doesn’t really seem to do any harm either. Occasionally I get to meet another writer I don’t already know. Even more rarely I get to meet someone who is not a writer but nonetheless appears to be somewhat interested in literature.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I would say my work is mainly about theoretical concerns and there are certainly no shortage of questions. For example… How might it be possible for people to overcome our societies over-emphasis on individualism and work together in order to combat the pernicious and destructive path corporate capitalism is currently jettisoning us along? Is art progressive, reactionary or simply self-absorbed? What would an emancipatory art actually look and feel like? What are the limitations of science and why do we so rarely perceive them? Is science our religion? Where might one find sources for hope or optimism within the strictures of our current global predicament? Why do people apparently take pleasure from mistreating or lording power over others? Is humanity like a cancer on the planet? Why don’t I have a more pleasant or upbeat outlook on life?

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I have never really worked with an outside editor. I would actually like to give it a try some day.
7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

I have always found the process of writing books fairly easy (though I do work on them obsessively, off and on, for years on end.) And here I will share something a bit too personal that I should probably have the good sense to keep to myself. All of the books I have written so far have been turned down by many publishers before someone finally said yes. This has resulted in a rather unbecoming pattern in which, when each book is finally published, I experience this accumulated sense of rejection as a kind of bitterness that ever-so-slightly poisons the positive feelings that might normally accompany having a new book out. I would very much like to let go of this bitterness but find I cannot. If anyone has any suggestions as to how I might do so I would absolutely like to hear them. Many of my all time favourite books were rejected many, many times before they were finally published. I feel this fact should give me solace but for some reason it does not. I also feel fairly certain that this particular condition signals a certain lack of maturity on my part. (Upon further consideration, I realize that perhaps the cure for such frustration might be feelings of gratitude, gratitude for the things I actually have received and accomplished, but it seems, so far at least, that gratitude is not really my strong suit.) As well, I often wonder where exactly I find the confidence (or arrogance) to keep sending out a manuscript that is being continuously rejected. I suppose somewhere I must believe that ‘out there’ there is in fact a publisher for everything. I am not sure whether to find such a sentiment reassuring or depressing.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Some time in the past six months. It was good.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

When I was in my early twenties I made many attempts to write a first novel. I was deeply dissatisfied with each of them. While the first twenty or thirty pages were often quite strong, afterwards there was a considerable and undeniable drop in quality and it really seemed like I was unable to maintain any narrative momentum. After the fourth or fifth failed attempt I was reading an interview with Milan Kundera in which he said that it was impossible to write a good novel before you were thirty, one simply did not yet have the proper breadth of life experience. Though at the time I hardly ever listened to anyone concerning artistic matters (I like to believe I am a little bit more open nowadays), I was sufficiently frustrated with my novel-writing attempts to stop trying for a while and see if he was right. About three years ago, when I was 33, I once again thought about trying to write a novel and, though I am not yet completely finished, I have to say that it has been much, much easier this time around. I feel, so far, that the energy of the work sustains well over the first hundred pages. (I am knocking on wood as I type this.) I’ll be curious to see if there will be more novels to follow.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to theatre to dance)? What do you see as the appeal?

I don’t really see any significant barriers between different genres or forms. I think over-specialization in the arts is killing art. I would like to see the Canada Council for the Arts re-organized into a non-genre specific structure, so that each jury would consist of artists from many different fields and they would also look at applications from many different fields. This would not only relieve the monotony of sitting on a jury, it would force artists of every stripe to expand their knowledge and expertise considerably. If I think only of contemporary literature, or only of contemporary dance, I get very, very depressed. However, if I allow myself to think of art and culture in some larger sense, if I think about all the works that have moved me deeply in literature, dance, music, theory, visual art, performance, etc. then there are moments when I have at least a little bit of hope in the ongoing value of culture and art.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t really have a routine. I work in relatively short, rather violent bursts of frenetic activity after which I feel drained and exhausted. Some years there is almost no writing at all while other years there is quite a lot. In the morning, if I don’t have to be anywhere, I will lie in bed for several hours and read.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

When my writing gets stalled I stop and wait for it to come back. A few times it has taken several years but, for whatever reason, I never try to force it.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

My most recent book Families Are Formed Through Copulation seems to be the bleakest, darkest thing I have ever written (though some people have also told me that they find it at the same time hopeful and enlivening, I suppose in part because it ‘tells it like it is’.) I attribute this darkening of tone to the current state of global politics, especially the situation in the United States. I think a lot about trying to write something that is not bleak and wonder whether I will ever again find it possible. The novel I am currently working on is equally bleak in its worldview but is somehow more lively in tone with a lot more narrative force that I feel gives it a strange kind of off kilter optimism. But what I think of as optimism might not really pass for most others.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I am influenced by almost everything but literature and theatre. Visual art, and more specifically writing about visual art, has been a particularly strong influence on my work over the past ten years. Especially the art writers: Dave Hickey, Boris Groys, Sven Lütticken, David Levi Strauss and David Batchelor.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Just to name a few, I think the literary writers who have influenced me most are Nicholas Mosley, Chris Kraus, Alvaro Mutis, David Markson, Ricardo Piglia, Wolfgang Koeppen, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the literary journalist Lawrence Weschler.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Commit suicide.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’m thinking of trying my hand at curating contemporary art. I often feel I have a kind of ‘visual art envy’. It seems to me that there is so much openness, freedom and criticality in visual art when compared to either theatre or literature. However, at the same time I feel that mainly what I am working towards is how to generate a strong, ongoing sense of freedom for myself in whatever field I happen to be working in.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I believe I began writing because I had very severe insomnia when I was younger and needed to find something to fill the endless empty nights. And I began making theatre because I found writing too lonely and wanted to work with other people. If I were to do it all over again I like to think that I would have the good sense to do something different but most likely I would not.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Book: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis
Film: Tropical Malady by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

20 - What are you currently working on?

A novel entitled Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, a performance project possibly entitled either Hospitality or Individualism Was A Mistake and a project in Brussels entitled An Anthology of Optimism.

Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed is a book about a group of activists who – in the very near future – meet once a week to discuss how the left might re-invent itself. These meetings they attend have one very specific and over-riding rule: they are there only to talk and, both within the meetings and during the rest of their daily lives, they are to do nothing that exceeds the boundaries of dialog for fear that if they were to actually engage in any activism or direct action they would be arrested, tortured and killed. They have collectively agreed that the time for action is not now, and it would be better to take all the time required to re-group in order to be completely prepared for the inevitable moment when the current near-fascist government either starts to crumble or lets down it’s guard.

Hospitality (or Individualism Was A Mistake) might be a series of performances, interventions, events and conferences that will take place in venues as varied as bars, theatres, art galleries, dance festivals, restaurants and perhaps even peoples homes and offices. While the precise nature of individual Hospitality undertakings can vary wildly, all Hospitality activities will focus on questions and strategies surrounding how friends and strangers alike can interact in a manner that is at the same time useful, critical, hospitable and surprising.

An Anthology of Optimism is a collaboration with the Flemish playwright and director Pieter De Buysser.

12 or 20 questions archive