(The Application Deadline has passed)

As part of the creation and presentation of the US premiere of THE PEOPLE in San Francisco, Big Art Group is offering a free 5 day workshop in the company’s training and compositional strategies with technology and the body.

Hybrid Body / Simultaneous Presence
A 5 day workshop September 5-9, 2011 at Z Space from 1-5pm (Tuesday 9.6.2011 will be from 2:30-5pm)
1. an introduction of Big Art Group’s Performance Practice (Real Time Film)
2. training and introduction to technology and concepts
3. time-limited studio compositional exercises
4. expansion of dramaturgy to the wider scope of THE PEOPLE
5. large group 5 channel compositions based on the themes of the project to be recorded and included in Big ART Group/YBCA/Z Space THE PEOPLE-San Francisco production September 16 & 17. (Attendance not required)

-Real Time Film; Task Based Choreography, or training the body for simultaneous presence. Movement based training in awareness of the video camera and its frame; learning multiple presence, or how to accomplish overlapping performance goals through moment-to-moment acting; dramaturgy of the Image; technical discussions about evolutions in image technology and the use of technology in performance.

-Video Puppetry; Radical Exchangeability; Queering Character: creating a character that exists only as an assemblage of the effort of several actors. Working as a group, exchanging control, and thinking as a cyborg. “Queer” used as a model for thinking beyond boundaries.

-Subverting Disposability- constructing performance from socially discarded objects, ideas, and stories. Constructing sets from trash, examining the role of “Junk Fiction.”

About Z Space

Z Space
450 Florida Street, San Francisco

Founded in 1993, Z Space is a hub for artists and audiences to revel in the creation, development, and production of outstanding new work. We commission, develop, and produce a full season of new works from a variety of disciplines including theater, dance, music, performance art, and new media. We foster opportunities around the nation for these works and for their Bay Area artists. We engage diverse audiences through direct interaction with the process, the projects, and the artists.

Since 2009 we have managed and operated a 13,000 sq/ft, 268-seat performing arts venue and gallery (formerly known as Theater Artaud): home to more than 40 weeks of public multidisciplinary arts programming annually.
www.zspace.org

Funding: This program is made possible in part by funding from the Hewlett Foundation, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Bernard Osher Foundation, and the NEA.

Big Art Group is currently editing and preparing video interviews we created with Bay Area participants during our residency at Headlands Center For The Arts this past Spring. These videos will be incorporated into the live video action performance of The People in and on the facade of Z Space in San Francisco co presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts September 16 & 17 2011.

Images from Italy 2007 and Germany 2008

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MORE INFORMATION:

YBCA and Z Space welcome New York-based performance troupe Big Art Group back to the Bay Area with their new work, The People: San Francisco, a site specific, outdoor extravaganza that combines live theater with large scale, real time video projection. The narrative, constructed from interviews with members of the local community who voice their thoughts about democracy, war, terrorism and justice as it relates to their personal histories, loosely recreates the story of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Live theatrical reenactments are intercut with earlier, taped interviews, projected via large scale video onto the side of a building where the live play and video are viewed by the audience at street level. Perceived as a kind of “living television,” The People repurposes commonly used media strategies such as video clips, interviews and re-enactments, to explore extraordinary forces reshaping contemporary government. It then sculpts these developments into a performative action that takes as its inspiration the foundational idea of community dialogue and the birth of democracy as theatrically embodied in the Oresteia. By inverting the established relationship between “mass-media” and private exchange, it transforms the “town square” into a public performance in which both performers and audience act out crucial roles in the construction of self-government.

The People: San Francisco is part of a larger cross-cultural work in which the video choruses from each location will be combined to create a window into the cultural understanding and variation of democratic public expression. To date, three productions in the series have been presented: The People—Italy, which took place in Polverigi, Italy with the participation and support of Inteatro Polverigi in 2007, The People—Germany, at Theatre der Welt 2008 in Halle, Germany, and The People—Austria at Szene Salzburg in 2010.  (from YBCA website)

ABOUT THE PIECE
In The People, the subjects are simultaneously audience, creators of their own scripts and actors in their own stories. The performance itself is site specific; it takes place in a public plaza using storefronts, houses, or office buildings. The space becomes the arena where the private meets the public, where the established order is inverted.

The creation of a production of The People takes place in three stages. First, approximately thirty local residents are chosen to be interviewed for the project. They are filmed being questioned by other residents on their thoughts and opinions about the chosen site, the town and their community. Drawing from this extended discussion, which also incorporates such themes from the Oresteia as personal history, democracy, war, terrorism and justice, their answers provide the basis of the production.

For the performance, the audience stands outside a chosen building. Within the building an unseen interviewer asks scripted questions to the participants inside as the audience watches a live, simulcast five channel video projection of the action on the façade of the building. What begins as a simulation of a spontaneous interview spills out into the street as a contemporary epic narrative, as the participants embody the characters of the Oresteia, revealing metaphors that turn ordinary, quotidian acts into theatrical expression. Spliced and edited onto the exterior of the buildings with the live theatrical play are the previously recorded interviews that act as video choruses.

The People is at once a component of a large-scale cross-cultural performance project and an original creation in its own right, exploring the relationship between performance, community and action. It takes place with the involvement of the local community in which the participants of the play are members of the public, creating a link between their personal stories and the realm of the epic, to shine a light on the relationship between the individual and the democratic process. It draws from classical traditions and Greek Tragedy as well as contemporary modes of mediated expression.

CREDITS
Created: Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson
Director and Scenographer: Caden Manson
Text and Sound: Jemma Nelson
Produced by Big Art Group
Lighting Design: Hillery Makatura
System Programer: Jared Mezzocchi
Production Manager: Ana Mari de Quesada
Company Performers: David Commander, Heather Litteer, Willie Mullins
Co-producers: Theatre Der Welt (Germany), Inteatro Festival (Italy), Szene Salzburg (Austria), Abrons Art Center (NYC)
Funders: MAP Fund 2009, New York State Council for the Arts

Here is a video of Laura Arrington testing the mirrored jacked in the sunlight streaming through the window of her Headlands Residency studio. Thank you Laura for letting us move in for awhile.

“Image Eaters”, a 36 page article by Jacob Gallagher-Ross about the work of Big Art Group, has been published in this quarters edition of TDR: The Drama Review.

Excerpt:

Theatre artists keen to investigate the theatrical possibilities of technological image-making must inevitably contend with the wearisome grumbling issuing from critics who see the invasion of screens, electronic sounds, and pop culture materials as heralding theatre’s surrender to predatory corporate interests and banal mass culture — relinquishing its supposedly sacral mission to present breathing bodies to a temporary community of other such bodies. But far from signaling the end of theatre’s vitality, Big Art Group’s innovations are renovating the art form for our media-baffled moment. Their theatrical methods are descended from Brecht: opening the apparatus of modern image-manufacturing to dissecting scrutiny, they take the discrepancies between live bodies onstage and their onscreen doppelgangers as a figure for media culture’s many forms of transubstantiation. Not content with staging simple binaries — live or recorded, image or material presence — Big Art Group graphs a spectrum: bodies that crave the hi-def perfection of the video image; images that long to be ratified by eliciting sensuous responses in the viewer. – Jacob Gallagher-Ross (TDR/The Drama Review Winter 2010, Vol. 54, No. 4 (T208): 54–80.)

TDR: The Drama Review is a quarterly journal focusing on performances in their social, economic, aesthetic, and political contexts. The journal covers dance, theatre, music, performance art, visual art, popular entertainment, media, sports, rituals, and performance in politics and everyday life. TDR is owned by New York University and is published in hard copy and online by the MIT Press.