Big Art Group

Big Art Group is a New York City-based experimental performance ensemble that uses language and media to push formal boundaries of theatre, film and visual arts to create culturally transgressive works. It has publicly declared its goal as the desire to develop innovative performances using original text, technology, and experimental methods of communication.

Founded by director Caden Manson and playwright Jemma Nelson in 1999, Big Art Group has produced original works, CLEARCUT, catastrophe (1999), The Balladeer (2000), Shelf Life (2001), Flicker (2002), House of No More (2004), Dead Set #2 and #3 (2006-7),"The Sleep", "The Imitation", "The People" (2007), "S.O.S." (2008), "Cityrama" and "Broke House". The first two works, Clearcut Catastrophe and The Balladeer, explored the development of new vocabularies for performance blending film and theatrical references and trained the ensemble in physically rigorous methods of stagecraft. Clearcut Catastrophe fused ideas from Chekhov's Three Sisters and the documentary Grey Gardens through methods of improvisation. These experiments evolved into a trilogy of works: Shelf Life, Flicker and House of No More. In these pieces, Manson invented an integrated spectacle which he dubbed ‘Real-Time Film’, a hybrid of film and theatre in which actors recombined formal ideas of performance through the use of simultaneous acting on stage and for live video using complex choreography, puppetry, and autobiography. He referred to the techniques of accomplishing filmic language such as cuts, pans, and zooms as treating "the actor as technology."

Thematically, the trilogy began with an acidic critique of consumerism with Shelf Life, which also marks author Jemma Nelson's writing debut. The sister piece, Flicker, used two storylines to create a linked examination of violence and commodity. The trilogy concluded with House of No More, which dismantled ideas of theatrical narrative, and attacked the idea of spectacle through an investigation of theatre as an analogy for worldbuilding.

In 2006 the company began a series of experimental video art, musical collaborations and reality performances, Dead Set #2 and #3,"The Sleep","The Imitation" and The People. Dead Set #2 and #3 continued Big Art Group's experimentation with live theatre and video, set and costume design to comment on themes of trauma and popular culture. The People was an expansion of real-time film that moved the theatre to the street, combining local participants, documentary research and site-specific creations and also fusing avant-garde performance with community expression. Retelling a contemporary version of the Oresteia, The People was simultaneously played and live-projected and broadcast into the public square of the Italian town of Polverigi.

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