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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THE PEOPLE (ITALY 2007, GERMANY 2008, SERIAL PROJECT,)
THE PEOPLE is a transformation of civil life: an expansion of the experiments of real-time film to a panoramic new scale: the conversion of a village into a multi-location video shoot, simultaneously projected & broadcast into the public square: a retelling of the Oresteia in the age of information war and electric vengeance: a counterstrike from the culturally assaulted.
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DEAD SET (#2 BERLIN 2006, #3 NYC 2007, SERIAL PROJECT)
Dead Set is a collection of footage, for a project, for a permanent record. The serial project exists as a sequence of notes : each part consists as an assemblage of modular concepts, that are rearranged for the duration of the spectacle. Dead Set#2 and #3 were organized around the topic of the image of trauma. Dead Set#2 was created first in Berlin at the Hebbel Theatre and for Paris at the Festival d’Automne à Paris. Further iterations of the series will involve non-theatrical performances, straight-to-video, and commerce. |
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HOUSE OF NO MORE (NYC 2004, Toured 2004, 2005, 2006)
In House of No More, CM/B hijacks America's cultural narrative by reenacting a soft core crime thriller which disintegrates into an abstract surface of hysteria and rage. With its idiosyncratic mix of precision, simulation, and exploding performance, Manson presents a disturbing reflection of the current hypersexualized climate of fear-marketing and single player world-building. In the final part of the trilogy, Real-Time Film is exploded into a multilayered performance that prefigures the group's move to new experiments in form. |
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FLICKER (NYC 2002, Toured 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005)
Two "movies" collide into each other and bleed onto a single
screen. In one movie, a failed suicide searches for a savior,
but entanges himself with a morbid voyeur and a controlling romantic;
and then he meets a sadistic nurse who speeds him along his path of
destruction. In another story, a group of city friends find themselves
lost in a wilderness that turns mythic and murderous. As the two films
intersect, a dark tale of disjunction emerges, exploring the need to
comprehend the irreality of death and the everyday presence of violence.
CM/B dissolves the form of horror and the experience
of witnessing brutality into the second installment of its Real Time
Film technique. |
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SHELF LIFE (NYC 2001, Toured 2003, 2004)
A live action movie unfurls on stage, a film in which three desperate collectors,
living in an thoroughly disposable world, become obsessed with an
alluring siren. 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
competition ignites into a bizarre and tragic struggle over the ownership
of happiness. Manson turns a sardonic eye on the
frenzy of consumerism, beginning the Real-Time Film trilogy. Split-second
choreography, frantic action & sound, plastic text that repulses
meaning, and the witness of the multiple event create a unique and
acclaimed method of performance. |
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THE BALLADEER (NYC 2000)
Mixing song, text, puppetry, dance and vivid, cinematic direction,
The Balladeer tells a freeform story of new love and its defeat. The
piece becomes a backdrop for an exploration of identity, anguish, desire;
by turns empathetic and vulgar. In an 'adolescent' work that led directly
to the technique of Real Time Film, Big Art Group mixes filmic and
televisual ideas with theatrical form to create a unnerving, bizarre
hybrid. |
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CLEARCUT, CASTROPHE! (NYC 1999)
The tragic entrapment of nostalgia and the futility of escapist
fantasies of the future play out in declining and decaying parallel
universes of the Maysles Brothers' documentary "Grey Gardens" and
of Chekhov's masterpiece "Three Sisters." Through
experimental structure and task-based choreography, the performers
attempt to embody multiple stories that unravel as quickly
as they are constructed. CM/B establishes their transgressive,
nonconformist objectives and techniques in this debut work. |
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