Big Art Group is a performance ensemble founded by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson in New York in 1999. The company’s works exist in the contemporary stream of postdramatic performance, wherein traditional narratives and established performer-audience relationships have been opened up to create possibilities of innovative discovery. The work blends high and low technology, marginal and mainstream culture, and blunt investigation to confront complex issues about our contemporary experience. Big Art Group has produced 22 original works including: CLEARCUT, catastrophe(1999), The Balladeer(2000), Shelf Life(2001), Flicker(2002), House of No More(2004), Dead Set (2006-Serial Project), The People(2007-Serial Project), The Sleep(2007), The Imitation(2008), SOS(2008), Cityrama (2010-Serial Project), Broke House (2012). In these pieces founder and director Caden Manson invented the integrated spectacle ‘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, digital puppetry, and live video framing.
In its history, the company has grown from a small New York underground performance group to an internationally prominent and critically recognized ensemble with essays and interviews in performance literature (PAJ, Theater Journal, Theater, Mouvement, Theatre Heute, Theater der Zeit), grants from The Jerome Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, DNA (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Arts International), Florence Gould Foundation, MAP Fund, étant donnés, and multiple invitations from leading festivals and presenters of contemporary performance in Germany, France, Scotland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Singapore, Vietnam, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Hungary, Australia, Canada, and the US