Jacob Wren, World Stage, Letters of Nomination

Jacob Wren (who did a Dancemakers Lab last year) and PME (including Double Bill #1 costume designer and stunning performer Claudia Fancello) are in town.

Their newest work, Hospitality 3: How Individualism was a Mistake opens tomorrow (Wednesday the 19th) at Harbourfront as part of World Stage.

Please see this work – Wren and PME are working so clearly and precisely on the state of the world and the state of performance.

I do want to say so much about this, it means such a great deal to me that this work exists and is supported (Thank you Harbourfront.)

Below is most of the letter I wrote a couple of years ago to nominate Jacob for the Siminovitch award for directing. It is a letter of nomination, so it is pretty one sided. But maybe that's ok right now.

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Something uncommon is going to happen. Something is different from the moment I enter the room – this is a different theatre. Beyond the careful, if cluttered, placement of daily objects, there is a feeling in the air – a stillness and depth that prompts me to care for my fellow audience members even as I take my seat. I am, before the beginning, at a kind of peace. A peace that is also excitement and expectation.

Something uncommon is going to happen. The performers enter or make themselves known – and they seem to share this peace/excitement. They are engaged in remarkable yet simple dialogues and situations. They play music and sometimes dance. They perform tasks that are gentle or sharp, but always possessed with a radical beauty in their humanity. There is laughter, both onstage and in the house – and it is honest, un-coerced laughter.

Something uncommon is going to happen. What is being talked about matters. To me, to them. They are talking about families or about the difficulty of talking or about the future. They are talking as if what they say might cause change in themselves and in us. All with a sublime casualness that draws me towards them as they ask us, the audience, to be with them. To risk changing with them.

Something uncommon is going to happen. A space is created. A space in which theatre matters. In which the way we (artists, audience) come together is consequent. Consequent not just in the moment of watching or doing, but also in the history of ideas and culture.

It is due to his dedication to this uncommon space and his ability to create it that I write to nominate Jacob Wren for the Siminovitch Award for directing.

For 17 years, Jacob Wren has put forth uncompromising and deeply considered productions that have been performed across Canada, in the USA, Asia, Australia and toured extensively in Europe. Beginning with his work with Candid Stammer, a company he founded in 1988 in Toronto, through his current work with PME, STO Union and others, Wren’s work has operated as an antidote to the status quo. Bold and decisive in both approach and material, his productions stand as beacons of contemporary Canadian performance.

With En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize in 1998, Wren entered a new stage in his work. Working within the French, Montreal-based theatre company PME for the first time he created a bilingual performance that addressed, in form and content, the problems of translation and language. Wren does not speak or understand French. The decision to create and direct work in languages he doesn’t understand [...] should be seen as part of continued dedication to challenging himself and the theatre he works in to ask fundamental questions about meaning and freedom. Concerned with the autonomy of both the performer and audience from the coercion of the director/author, Wren seeks out strategies to disrupt and distance his own authority in his work. Continually searching for a way to be in the world that is more humane, his work is as invested and rigorous with its ethics as its aesthetic. It invites us to imagine a better world, a more truly democratic way of organizing ourselves. A world where people, languages and cultures stand beside each other in mutual struggle for something more. Wren’s work could be, to paraphrase Foucault on Deleuze – a primer for anti-fascist living.

[...]

Look through the archives of Toronto’s vibrant independent theatre scene of the early nineties and Wren is there [...] With collaborators including Nadia Ross, Tracy Wright, Daniel Brooks, Darren O’Donnell and Paul Bettis, Wren helped define emergent and vital performance at the Theatre Centre, Buddies in Bad Times and Theatre Passe Muraille. While the conservatism of the Harris years scattered some of the energies of the time, Wren is part of an important legacy and through-line that can be seen in Toronto in the current work of O’Donnell and Brooks, younger artists such as Emergency Exit, Erika Hennebury, Ame Henderson, Chad Dembski and myself as well as the continued influence and importance of the Theatre Centre, Rhubarb! Festival and other theatres Wren worked with.

Wren’s impact in Montreal and Quebec, where he has been solely based for the last five years, has been equally important. The casual style of performance and the relational aesthetics brought in a radical way by Wren to Quebec as early as 1996 has influenced many young artists in dance (working around Tangente and Studio 303), theatre, as well as collectives run by mid-career artists. Artists he has collaborated with and supported include Martin Bélanger, Chanti Wadge, Le Théâtre du Grand Jour and Système Kangourou to name just a few.

For emerging performance makers, Wren represents an alternative path – offering the potential of a life in art and the theatre that is principled and possible (if at times difficult.) His continuing growth and desire to challenge and destabilize himself before all else is an inspiration and call to duty for all artists.

While working with PME, Jacob has continued to make work with Nadia Ross and STO Union, to create performance projects with new collaborators and to write about art for C Magazine and others. His connection and concern for visual art and music serves as an important bridge between contemporary practices in those forms and theatre - a bridge too often ignored. It stands as testament to his belief that theatre must hold a place in the development of arts and culture in the broadest sense.

Wren’s vision transcends what a play might look like to encompass what a theatre might look like and reflects a deep inquiry into what a society might look like. It is a unique and important vision that I believe deserves our full support and celebration as it continues to create uncommon theatre that matters.