Caden Manson/Big Art Group is a New York City performance company founded in 1999. The company uses the language of media and blended states of performance in a unique form to build culturally transgressive and challenging new works. Since its inception, it has toured nationally and internationally and produced five new major pieces including the 'Real Time Film' trilogy Shelf Life, Flicker, and House of No More
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SHELF LIFE (2001-2004)
Shelf Life is a live action movie unfurls on stage, a film in which the desperate James, Wendy, and Max, living in an pervasively disposable world, become obsessed with the alluring Frankie. Each tries to possess and mold her in the form of their own media-induced desires, even as she uses them as a means to her own consumptive ends. Fueled by jealousy, rage, and betrayal, this "love quadrangle" ignites into a bizarre and tragic struggle over the ownership of happiness. Big Art Group's 2001 work dives deep into our garbage-loving culture and tells a tender cinematic love story doomed to sour in Shelf Life.
Shelf Life uses found images, garbage, live synchronized sound, and Real Time Film Technique. “Real-Time Film” was developed as a conceptual model collapsing performance, television, and movies using live action and video. It examines the use of image in entertainment, the experience of the image versus its manufacture, and the split between surface and interior.
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TOURING HISTORY:
2004 Kaiitheatre (Brussels, Belgium)
Hebbel Am Ufer (Berlin, Germany)
Festpielhaus Hellerau (Dresden, Germany)
2003 Pan Pan Theatre Symposium (Dublin, Ireland)
The Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN)
Fresh Terrain/PS122/UT (Austin, TX)
The Wexner Center For The Arts (Columbus, OH)
The Warhol Musium (Pittsburg, PA)
Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, Germany)
Sommerszene (Salzburg, Austria) |
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VIDEO:
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PRESS:
"New York's Big Art Group closed the Pan Pan Theatre Symposium with a multimedia event that can be taken as a template for use of the form" – Irish Times
"...clearly cutting edge." – Lavender Magazine "extraordinary new production...confirms the troupe's standing as one of New York's most innovative companies." – Next Magazine "...gloomily hilarious portrait of our disposable society." – Backstage " a rarity–a hybrid of film and play." – Showbusiness Weekly "hysterically wacky...beguilingly enjoyable...giddy" – AmericanTheaterWeb.com "clever and jarring...inventive" – The Village Voice
"Ultra-clever...exposes the abscess behind the shiny promise of commercialism." – Citysearch.com Critic's Pick "Shelf Life is a uniquely vivid cross betweena movie and a play. " – Talkin Broadway
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