Hungry Eyes Festival will screen Caden Manson/Big Art Group’s 4-channel video SOS/Animals/Action at this year’s festival in Geißen, Germany, August 26-28, 2022.
BROKE HOUSE
A Performance Crisis
“True to their name, Big Art Group’s performances are big in every possible way: prismatic visuals hurtle across a panoply of screens, dazzling with flashing colors; strange conjunctions of video imagery captured live by a battery of cameras and spliced together in real time, ambush the eye; digital soundscapes thrum, groan, and roar at synesthesia-inducing volumes.”
– Jacob Gallagher-Ross, The Drama Review
On a skeletal set webbed with video cameras, a family of characters and their hangers-on try to recall their given roles as the foundations of their dreams collapse, expelling them into a desert of their futures: part comedy, part ritual, part love spell.
The performance explores a process of construction sharply interrupted by historical events and dissolved into the shapelessness of an aftermath. The processes that were “building” previous to the play’s beginning include a life, a family, architecture— or a system of beliefs, an economy of values, and the creation of the performance itself. But when events intervene— events like societal incoherence, economic upheaval, climate disaster, abandonment, forgetting, and strife— the raw materials and the players themselves become deformed into a new purposelessness and enter a transitional state of potentiality. Like the pause loop in a video game, Broke House takes place in this marginal time.
Like all of Big Art Group’s works, Broke House offers our meditation on the current states of America, which we believe have been in flux for at least as long as our ensemble has been up and running. Beyond the symptoms of housing crises, credit crises, and extremist rhetoric, we suppose that the metaphorical heart of the country has been suffering and perhaps has decided to rebuild the body that surrounds it.
Big Art Group is a New York-based experimental performance ensemble founded by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson in 1999. The group creates innovative performances using experimental strategies with text, technology, and the body. Big Art Group has produced 22 original works. In the early 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 matrixed live video and embodied mediated performance. The company’s works exist in the contemporary stream of performance. The work blends high and low technology, marginal and mainstream culture, and blunt investigation to confront complex issues about present experience.
The 50th International Biennale Teatro will take place from 24 June to 3 July 2022, under the direction of Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte: on the program shows and appointments with the most important protagonists of the contemporary theater scene, in addition to the productions made in the context of Biennale College Teatro, the training project dedicated to young artists. Authors and directors, Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte trained at the Silvio d’Amico National Academy of Dramatic Art and at New York University. The ensemble of the same name was formed in 2005. Among the prizes won: Hystrio, Vallecorsi, Fondi-La Pastora, Studio 12, Oddone Cappellin, for Dramaturgy and the Gibellina / Salvo Randone Award for Theater.
Credits:
Created by Caden Manson, Jemma Nelson, Big Art Group
Direction and Scenography by Caden Manson
Sound by Jemma Nelson
Assistant Director Kathleen Amshoff and Bradley Kal Hagen
Performed by
David: Edward Stresen-Reuter
Manny: David Commander
RiRi: Heather Litteer
Jerry: Matthew Nasser
Jerri: Nicholas Gorham
Olga: Willie Mullins, Matthew Nasser
Lighting Design by Hillery Makatura
Broke House is produced by Big Art Group with support from King’s Fountain and NYSCA
photo: © Ves Pitts
BROKE HOUSE
A Performance Crisis
“True to their name, Big Art Group’s performances are big in every possible way: prismatic visuals hurtle across a panoply of screens, dazzling with flashing colors; strange conjunctions of video imagery captured live by a battery of cameras and spliced together in real time, ambush the eye; digital soundscapes thrum, groan, and roar at synesthesia-inducing volumes.”
– Jacob Gallagher-Ross, The Drama Review
On a skeletal set webbed with video cameras, a family of characters and their hangers-on try to recall their given roles as the foundations of their dreams collapse, expelling them into a desert of their futures: part comedy, part ritual, part love spell.
The performance explores a process of construction sharply interrupted by historical events and dissolved into the shapelessness of an aftermath. The processes that were “building” previous to the play’s beginning include a life, a family, architecture— or a system of beliefs, an economy of values, and the creation of the performance itself. But when events intervene— events like societal incoherence, economic upheaval, climate disaster, abandonment, forgetting, and strife— the raw materials and the players themselves become deformed into a new purposelessness and enter a transitional state of potentiality. Like the pause loop in a video game, Broke House takes place in this marginal time.
Like all of Big Art Group’s works, Broke House offers our meditation on the current states of America, which we believe have been in flux for at least as long as our ensemble has been up and running. Beyond the symptoms of housing crises, credit crises, and extremist rhetoric, we suppose that the metaphorical heart of the country has been suffering and perhaps has decided to rebuild the body that surrounds it.
Big Art Group is a New York-based experimental performance ensemble founded by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson in 1999. The group creates innovative performances using experimental strategies with text, technology, and the body. Big Art Group has produced 22 original works. In the early 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 matrixed live video and embodied mediated performance. The company’s works exist in the contemporary stream of performance. The work blends high and low technology, marginal and mainstream culture, and blunt investigation to confront complex issues about present experience.
The 50th International Biennale Teatro will take place from 24 June to 3 July 2022, under the direction of Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte: on the program shows and appointments with the most important protagonists of the contemporary theater scene, in addition to the productions made in the context of Biennale College Teatro, the training project dedicated to young artists. Authors and directors, Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte trained at the Silvio d’Amico National Academy of Dramatic Art and at New York University. The ensemble of the same name was formed in 2005. Among the prizes won: Hystrio, Vallecorsi, Fondi-La Pastora, Studio 12, Oddone Cappellin, for Dramaturgy and the Gibellina / Salvo Randone Award for Theater.
Credits:
Created by Caden Manson, Jemma Nelson, Big Art Group
Direction and Scenography by Caden Manson
Sound by Jemma Nelson
Assistant Director Kathleen Amshoff and Bradley Kal Hagen
Performed by
David: Edward Stresen-Reuter
Manny: David Commander
RiRi: Heather Litteer
Jerry: Matthew Nasser
Jerri: Nicholas Gorham
Olga: Willie Mullins, Matthew Nasser
Lighting Design by Hillery Makatura
Broke House is produced by Big Art Group with support from King’s Fountain and NYSCA
photo: © Ves Pitts
This summer, Caden will be teaching at La Biennale di Venezia Teatro June 27 – July 3, 2022 as part of the Biennale College Teatro. They will be joining other esteemed teachers Milo Rau, Carlus Padrissa (La Fura dels Baus), and more.
Dates: June 27 – July 3
Language: English
Recipients: multi-purpose theater artists. Actors / actresses, writers / writers, performers, directors, playwrights and dancers of any kind, interested in teamwork and collaboration as a whole.
Age: +18> 40
Participants: up to a maximum of 10
WORKSHOP
FRAMEWORKS
Frameworks is a set of live digital creation techniques and mediated strategies for contemporary performance. Includes new and expanding vocabulary that reflects and embodies our hyper-connected world; includes exercises for creators, collaborators and participants in performative works and is committed to working with contemporary technology. In FRAMEWORKS, we will explore and practice with concepts and exercises focused on “The Hybrid Body” (training the body in simultaneous presence and double event) and “Performance After The Internet” (embracing new narrative strategies in performance development and embodying the gap digital / analog).
My work develops in the red intersection between the metaverse and the internet crisis. It is a collision of flesh, blood, bone and the digital and networked doppelganger of the body. My performance strategies live in the flashing red lights of the alarm zone, where time is up. Work stirs and plays as it arms technology to vivisect and recombine history, time, place and bodies. My performances are Frankenstein’s monster, sliced flesh and sutures, showing the method of his creation. What do you believe in this information battlespace? To the performers, the media or the margins? I exploit the image against itself, to interrupt and corrupt a dominant vision. I don’t celebrate technology, I contaminate our roles as consumers of images, data bodies, and identities guarded on the net.
This year’s edition of Special Effects Festival asks…
How do we combine difference?
How do we assemble coalition?
and what is the power of togetherness.
Artist driven and oriented, Special Effects gathers experimental performance works by practitioners exploring contemporary issues. Drawing on a network of over 8K artists who are part of contemporaryperformance.com, the festival samples the diversity and richness of the discipline of performance and presents an open forum for critical thinking on the issues of the day.
Special Effects Festival (SFX) was founded in 2014 by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson, artistic directors of Big Art Group and editors at Contemporary Performance Network. Our mission has been to present artists during the Annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference in January in NYC each year. We focus on presenting LBGTQIA+, POC, women, and non-binary artists, giving a platform for exciting, inclusive, genre-breaking work and voices.
Tickets are $20.
January 9, 2020 @ 8pm
Packing and Cracking
created by Rachel Karp and Joseph Amodei
Tickets: $20
Directed by Rachel Karp
Designed by Joseph Amodei
Do we choose our politicians, or do our politicians choose us? PACKING AND CRACKING is an interactive mapmaking event about gerrymandering: the pervasive practice of politicians choosing their voters rather than the other way around. Through participatory drawing and map-drawing games, PACKING AND CRACKING uses critical cartography, historical accounts of the first gerrymanders, and interviews with people dealing with gerrymandering today to show how easy and disenfranchising gerrymandering can be and ask what, if anything, we should do about it.
January 10, 2020 @ 8pm
Gray Spaces: Rally
Curated and hosted by Lisa Clair
Tickets: $20
Braulio Cruz – The Braille of the Soul
Kristin Worrall – The Recipe: The Transformation of Milk
Sauda Aziza Jackson / April Sweeney – I DIGRESS: The intimate insights of a childhood weirdo
Joey Weiss / Kate Benson – PDF on painting
Braulio Cruz – The Braille of the Soul
Tickets: $20
The Braille of the Soul piece aims to connect themes of home, ancestry, and intimacy within the songs to a video collage running on shuffle.
Kristin Worrall – The Recipe: The Transformation of Milk
Tickets: $20
A brief investigation into the potentialities of milk.
Kristin Worrall is a pastry artist, performer, and musician who lives in New York City.
Sauda Aziza Jackson / April Sweeney – I DIGRESS: The intimate insights of a childhood weirdo
Tickets: $20
Sauda Jackson weaves together personal tales from her childhood with the media and memorabilia that defined her past in this multimedia performance piece, part memoir, a sliver of music, a quarter bio-drama, and a dribble of her own special sauce. I DIGRESS, a performance memoir, explores the weight of inheritance and the recollection of memories and material things once lost to time.
Joey Weiss / Kate Benson – PDF on painting
Tickets: $20
In the past painting was slow. In the future painting was free in the future without a job. PDF on painting is a presentation on painting.
Big Art Group is discussed in depth in the new article, “Doubleness on the New York Contemporary Experimental Stage: Bodies and Technology” by Emeline J. Jouve. The article can be read in French or In English.
“Doubleness on the New York Contemporary Experimental Stage: Bodies and Technology” explores the representations of bodies in a corpus of plays by New York artists from the “New American Avant-Garde.” Intermediality, or the co-presence or superimposition of different artistic media, creates dual bodies: technological monsters that are half-human and half-video, grotesque minotaurs at once men and puppets. A “place for viewing,” theatre,
You read the article at this link – > https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica
Photo: © Big Art Group
Pictured: David Commander, Edward Stresen-Reuter, Mikeah Ernest Jennings
Big Art Group’s script from the 2017 work, OPACITY, presented at the Bard Live Arts Biennial is in Yale University’s Theater Magazine published by Duck University Press.
Opacity is built around the framework of the “interface,” specifically the threat of the increasingly opaque intermediation of algorithms between the real and the experienced. The performance uses sculptural, choreographic and computational models to hack, encrypt, spoof, troll, spam and camouflage our digital identities, and return these coded selves to the realms of the real. The performance consists of modular scenes of mundane life staged in sculptural abstraction, exploring desires and attempts to connect to one another online through opaque interfaces (social media sites, romance apps, image-sharing web apps), with their simultaneous abilities of cloaking, catfishing, fake accounts, bogus avatars, twitter bots, algorithmic responses and the system’s constant surveillance from behind the interface. Each scene alternates with synthetically produced contemporary songs, touchpoints to the obsolete and ‘warm’ technology that foreshadowed the all-enveloping cloud which entangles our daily lives of omnipresent data collection.
Credits:
System, Installation, Sound, and Text: Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson
Performed: Kevin Ramser and Philip Gates
Code: Jemma Nelson and Sylvie Sherman
Assistant Director: Rachel Karp
Assistant Video: Adam Thompson
3D Modeling: Kevin Ramser
Developed with the Digital Devising Lab Class at Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama: Caitlin Ayer, Stephen M. Eckert, Philip Gates, Rachel Karp, Sara Lyons, Kevin Ramser, Sylvie Sherman, Adam Thompson
Manson, Caden, and Jemma Nelson. “Opacity.” Theater, vol. 48, no. 1, Apr. 2018, pp. 32–53.
Opacity
Caden Manson will be speaking about FRAMEWORKS, a system for researching, thinking, and making Contemporary Performance created by Manson and Jemma Nelson (Big Art Group) at the The Chaos & Method Symposium at DAMU in Prague, CZ May 28 & 29, 2018.
This symposium is a gathering of pedagogues, artists and students where we share experiences about teaching the ‘unthinkable’: a place to sigh, collapse and think together. But it will also be a place of pragmatic mapping of the field: What are the existing, specific methodologies that we use in teaching contemporary performance? What are individual fields and disciplines thought at different schools? What is the proportion of theory and practice? How is the future ‘career’, possibility to build future connections, provided to students? How do we help them towards their own aesthetics? What is the form of the bachelor studies vs. master studies, what is the difference?
The symposium is organized by the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre of DAMU that has since its establishing in 1952 achieved international recognition and has since its beginnings cultivated new approaches to theatre making. It is vitally connected to the distinguished tradition of Czech ‘authorial’ theatre and puppetry, yet integrates the newest theatrical trends in the areas of object theatre, media, improvisation and visual arts.
Conveners: MgA. Sodja Zupanc Lotker MgA et Ph.D – Course Leader of the MA in Directing Devised and Object Theatre at KALD DAMU and and MgA. Lukáš Jiřička, Ph.D.
Other institutions giving talks: Tom Sellar (Yale School of Drama), Barbara Van Lindt (Das Arts, Amsterdam), Caden Manson (Carnegie Mellon University), Maya Levy (The School of Visual Theatre, Jerusalem), Steinnum Knuttsdotir (Iceland University of the Arts), Philipp Schulte (Hessian Theatre Academy, Frankfurt), Agnieszka Korytkowska-Mazur (Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw), Silvia Ferrando Luquin (ESAD, Barcelona), Florian Reichert and Sibylle Heim (HKB, Bern), Jan Hančil (AMU, Prague Rector), Ana Contreras Elvira (RESAD, Madrid), Lucia Repašská (JAMU, Brno), Alexander Roberts (Iceland University of the Arts), Karmenlara Ely (Norwegian Theatre Academy, Østfold University College, Fredrikstad), Julika Meyer (HMDK, Stuttgart) and François Duconseille (HEAR, Strasbourg), Iga Ganczarczyk (PWST, Krakow), Zane Kreicberga (Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga), Bruce Barton (School of Creative and Performing Arts, University of Calgary).
Full schedule: bit.ly/
Contemporary Performance has published Contemporary Performance Currents edited by Caden Manson and researched and written by the members of the Contemporary Performance Think Tank.
The Contemporary Performance Think Tank: Currents focuses on contemporary performing artists and companies redefining the formal relationships of architecture, artist, and audience. For this book, the Think Tank chose five areas on the forefront of this research to explore; Contemporary Choreography, Mixed Reality Performance, Performance Cabaret, Immersive Theatre, and Social Engaged Art. Each section of this book includes an introduction to the specific practice, a conversation with an artist, and a list of artists working in and around the specific practice.
The JHI-UTM Seminar on Digital and Mixed Reality Performance presents:
Big Art Group (NYC)
From Real Time Film to Cryptopresence: Big Art Group’s Performance Strategies
Talk and Reception
Thursday March 22, 2018
3-5 p.m.
Robert Gill Theatre, 214 College Street
Use the St. George entrance (on the east side of the building), and take the stairs/elevator to the 3rd floor
An RSVP is required to attend this event. Click HERE to RSVP.
For more information, please contact the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at 416 978-7987.
Big Art Group is a New York City performance company founded in 1999 by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson. The company uses the language of media and blended states of performance in a unique form to build challenging new works. Since its inception, it has toured nationally and internationally and produced critically acclaimed works including the ‘Real Time Film’ trilogy Shelf Life, Flicker, House of No More; SOS; and its reality-based theatre series The People.
This event is part of the University of Toronto Mississauga / Jackman Humanities Institute Annual Seminar, “Digital and Mixed Reality Performance.” Read more about the series.
Co-sponsored by the the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, Jackman Humanities Institute and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson curate the 5th annual Special Effects Festival in NYC January 11-13, 2018 at The Wild Project in the East Village.
Artist driven and oriented, Special Effects gathers experimental performance works by practitioners exploring contemporary issues. Drawing on a network of over 7K artists who are part of contemporaryperformance.com, the festival samples the diversity and richness of the discipline of performance and presents an open forum for critical thinking on the issues of the day.
Tickets are $25 (Free Drink Ticket).
“This year’s edition of Special Effects Festival asks, how do we strengthen community, how do we build empathy, and how do we stay focused and carry each other through this clusterf*ck”.
Artist presented this year are Becca Blackwell, Kate Dakota Kremer, Maiko Kikuchi, Jeremy O. Harris, Cara Francis, Alex Borinsky, Zoë Geltman, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff. Lisa Clair curates Gray Spaces this year.
Big Art Group