caden manson/big art group (performance/media)| new york city

Cinema Fury: The Imitation ->>>
Creation November 2007 - January 2008
Premieres January 24, 2008 at HAU 1 Hebbel Am Ufer (Berlin, Germany)

Big Art Group presents Cinema Fury: The Imitation. Big Art Group's project, Cinema Fury, is an ongoing series of experimental video art and musical collaborations; a spontaneous, open framework continually in production and evolution, resulting in special performance events. The Group performed the first of its Cinema Fury series “The Sleep” in Rome as part of Notte Bianca 2007. The Cinema Fury series continues Big Art Group’s interest in image-theatre as a new line of research abstractly exploring the relationship between the video image and live performance.

For The Imitation, Big Art Group collaborates with notable New York-based musical figures Theo Kogan and Sean Pierce, and Tony-nominated singer/actor Justin Bond. Theo Kogan is well known as a founding member and lead vocalist from seminal riot grrrl punk group the Lunachicks and Sean Pierce is equally renowned for his previous band The Toilet Boys, a cutting-edge queer-metal-punk band. Recently the two have created a new musical collaboration called Theo and the Skyscrapers, whose latest album “So Many Ways to Die” has been described as ”Blondie’s tourbus smashing into Slayer on Gary Numan’s driveway.”

Justin Bond was nominated for a Tony in 2007 for his Broadway portrayal of the infamous political punk cabaret duo Kiki and Herb, lauded by the NYTimes as “radioactive with an angry sorrow, ecstasy and fatigue so profound that it turns into cosmic punch-drunkenness.” Bond appeared in Big Art Group’s first production in an iconic dual role of Masha/Little Edie that melded the Maysles’s Brothers famous documentary film “Grey Gardens” with Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.”

Spearheading the project are Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson, the founders and creators of Big Art Group. They have traveled and presented their company's work in Europe, Asia and America, returning to The Hebbel Am Ufer for the fifth time. They are joined by Big Art Group members David Commander, Heather Litteer, Edward Stressen-Reuter, and new comer, Viva Ruiz. Their work has been called “hypnotic, disturbing, anxiety-inducing” by Telerama and “visually and sonically ravishing...leaving you rattled, amazed and perhaps a little queasy” by Time Out New York.

Cinema Fury: The Imitation takes a starting point from the melodramatic films of Douglas Sirk, whose early career included theatrical productions in the young days of the Hebbel Theatre; and who rose to prominence as a director in golden-era Hollywood with films marked for their saturated colors, sentimental plots and yet idiosyncratically critical attacks on American middle-class values.

The Imitation is Big Art Group’s "love letter" to NYC. With video backgrounds made entirely of garbage from the streets of NYC, Alice arrives in New York to carve a place for herself in the new gilded age as an artist; she finds a keen partner in the already-successful businessman Paul. Willing to sacrifice anything for her dream, Alice betrays a dark secret to her ambition that requires equal surrender
from her accomplice. As they begin a frantic series of attempts to remap themselves into increasingly volatile representations of “success,” her secret corrodes their schemes and the two yield to an upsurging chthonic chaos. Crossing the boundary from golden-era Hollywood to the new gilded age of New York, from classic cinema to outsider video art, Big Art Group's The Imitation celebrates the ecstasy of transgression.

Runs January 24-27, 2008 at HAU 1 Hebbel Am Ufer, Berlin, Germany

SOS ->>>
May 29-31 and June 1, 2008 at The Vienna Festival (Vienna, Austria)

SOS is a "party" to change the future. Set in a forest of technology, the performance unwinds in a series of narratives, a line of traps that try to capture a revolution in thought and revolt in action. SOS embodies a series of cascading stories, interconnected and interwoven, about the world in flux. Four animals, pushed from their natural habitat, search for a new home; four mercenaries, propelled by an impulse for overthrow, seek a new path to political change; four technology addicts, enmeshed in their perception, seek a new clarity of addiction. As each of their environments collide and overturn, the stage transforms into a celebration of chaos and an exploration of the
sacrifice necessary for renewal.

SOS is a new creation by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson and their company, Big Art Group. SOS is an action media performance exploring futureness, survivalism, revolutionary movements, and contemporary rituals of renewal to reevaluate the notion
of sacrifice in order to create a new beginning. SOS continues and advances Big Art Group?s ground breaking Real-Time Film technique, a conceptual model conflating performance, television, and movies. Using live performance and video, Real-Time Film plays cinematic composition and controlled perspective against the verity of TV broadcast and the immediacy of live performance. In SOS, a multi-camera and multiscreen forest of technology give the audience a panoptic and frame within frame view of the multiple narratives. Unlike traditional theatrical performance, Big Art Group?s extended media performances reposition viewers into active editors, leading audience members into problem-solving complex issues of sexuality, race, narrative, truth, and value in contemporary mediatic society.