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A User’s Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling

Showing on Feb 5–6

Playing at Western Front

A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling performance man holding record player

PME-ART (Canada)

“[T]he creator manages to bring the past to life, to question the present, and even to formulate some hopes for the future.” 

Le Devoir

After 20 years with PME-ART, co-artistic director Jacob Wren felt he should mark the occasion with something special—so he wrote a book. In keeping with the collective’s practice, Authenticity Is a Feeling blurs the lines between several genres: personal memoir, official history, manifesto… In the end, Wren and his co-conspirators decided to turn this book about performance into a performance itself. Thus we have this User’s Guide—an artist’s talk of sorts, but one that tilts toward the unconventional end of the spectrum.

Wren speaks to the audience, displays photos, plays music, dances and even disrobes; the goal is to entertain, to inform, to make a case for the relevance and value of performance art as a mode of resistance—as something that can make a difference in this troubled world.

A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling performance man playing record
Photo: ©Leontien Allemeersch
A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling performance man holding record player
Photo: ©Leontien Allemeersch
A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling performance
Photo: ©Leontien Allemeersch

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Artist Bio

PME-ART (Canada)

PME-ART is a loose collective of artists who practise many disciplines; what unites them is an engagement with the ethics of collaboration. The group’s projects are a negotiation between structure and spontaneity, and have involved literature, visual art, music and more, often in very creative combinations. 

Venue

Western Front

303 East 8th Ave, Vancouver

Showtimes

February 5, 8PM
February 6, 6PM
Post-Show Talkback: Feb 5-6

95 mins, no intermission

Tickets

Single tickets $15
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Or call 604.449.6000

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Access

Icon signalling a low vision friendly performance

Low Vision Friendly / Introduction below

Icon signalling a relaxed performance (casual or low sensory)

Extra Live (Always Relaxed) BUT there will be darkness (See Visual Story, which will be available soon)

Icon signalling a wheelchair accessible performance

Stairs

Click here for the pdf version of the Introduction for patrons who are blind or have low vision
Click here to download the Word version

Click here to see or download the visual story

Credits

PERFORMER Jacob Wren, with the explicit or implicit contributions from PME-ART’s collaborators COSTUMES Claudia Fancello LIGHTING Paul Chambers PRODUCTION & TECHNICAL MANAGER Nikita Bala

PRODUCED BY PME-ART CREATED IN RESIDENCY & CO-PRODUCED BY La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines (Montréal), Inkonst (Malmö), FFT (Düsseldorf) SUPPORTED WITHIN the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media SUPPORTED BY Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Conseil des arts de Montréal

Partners