Jacob Wren

1998

Book, 13.5 x 18.3 cm, 92 p, language: English (also translated into French: Le Génie des Autres), ISBN: 1552450376 (ISBN13: 9781552450376).
Materials: ink, paper

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2025/988).

Literary synopsis

A series of theatrical proposals – to be repeated, discarded, performed simultaneously and/or recombined in any and all of the many possible combinations – all vaguely relating to the topic of the author’s considerable moral ambivalence. About the things we think and do that we know, on so many levels, are more than a bit fucked up, but that somehow we must do anyway. Things that make life ‘ugly’ and ‘worth living’ all at the same time. Pathetic, sharp, harmless and vicious: these are the contradictions that pushed and pulled these paragraphs into existence, paragraphs that can be read in any order you choose.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Unrehearsed Beauty is a text originally commissioned by the TextConText conference in September, 1997, a conference organized by the BIT Teatergarasjen in Bergen, Norway. The conference proposed to examine innovative and unexpected ways of using written text in contemporary works of theatre and/or performance. In Bergen, sections of the Unrehearsed Beauty were performed in Norwegian translation by three Norwegian actors, directed by the Quebec director Carole Nadeau. A few years later, in 2002, Wren’s performance group PME-ART used sections of the text as the basis for their performance Unrehearsed Beauty/Le Génie des Autres.

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