The Balladeer
The Balladeer
Description:
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 an unnerving, bizarre hybrid.
Press:
“… a strong new voice in downtown theatre.” – Time Out New York
“the company continues to deliver on its promise to “aggressively attack the boundaries of theatre” in a most unusual way- with intelligence, talent, humor and a refreshing lack of pretentiousness.” – Next
“A high school dance becomes a backdrop for an intelligent exploration of identity, anguish, desire. Affecting and funny in its vulgar way.” – Village Voice
“…a worthy candidate for cult status, unfolding like a downtown theater version of a midnight movie.” – Matinee Magazine
“Manson is out to challenge propriety in every way he can.” – Citysearch.com
“fresh, insightful, and clever” – TheatreMania.com
Shelf Life
Shelf Life
Description:
In Shelf Life a live action movie unfurls on stage, a film in which three desperate characters who inhabit a consumer wasteland become obsessed with an alluring icon. Each tries to possess and mold her in the form of their 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.
Shelf Life uses found images, garbage, sampled sounds, and Real Time Film technique: 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.
Video:
Images:
Creation 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)
2001
The Krain Theater (NYC)
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
Flicker
Flicker
Description:
Ficker uses Big Art Group’s Real Time Film technique of live video projection and split second-choreography to examine the image of violence in this second part of the RTF trilogy. In Flicker, two “movies” collide into each other and bleed onto a single screen. In one narrative, voyeurism and softcore sadomasochism spin out of control, while the B-story follows a group of city friends who 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. A comedy.
Credits:
Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson
Direction/Set/Video: Caden Manson
Sound/Music: Jemma Nelson
Text: Jemma Nelson with Caden Manson and Rebecca Sumner Burgos
Produced by Big Art Group and Diane White
Performed by: Amy Miley, Linsey Bostwick, Rebecca Sumner Burgos, David Commander, Cary Curran, Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Willie Mullins, Jeff Randall, Tommy Lonardo, Justin Christopher, and Jon Norman Schneider
Assistant Director: Linsey Bostwick
Lighting Design: Jared Klein
Costume Design: Kim Gill and Nini Hu
Movement Trainer: Amy Miley
Video:
Images:
Creation History:
2005
In Motion Festival (Barcelona, Spain)
REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA USA)
Teatro Central (Sevilla, Spain)
VEO Festival (Valencia, Spain)
Teatro Canovas (Málaga, Spain)
Teatro Alhambra (Granada, Spain)
Teatro La Fenice (Senigallia, Italy)
Trafó (Budapest, Hungary)
STUK (Leuven, Belgium)
2004
New Territories Festival (Glasgow, Scotland)
Emilia Romagna Teatro (Modena, Italy)
Sommerszene Festival (Salzburg, Austria)
2003
The Via Festival (Maubeuge, France)
Inteatro Polverigi (Polverigi, Italy)
Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Zurich, Switzerland)
La Bâtie-Festival de Genève (Geneva, Switzerland)
De (internatonale) Keuze van de Rotterdamse Schouwburg (Rotterdam, Netherlands)
Le Vie de Festival (Rome, Italy)
SpielArt Festival (Munich, Germany)
Hebbel Theater (Berlin, Germany)
Mettre en Scène (Rennes, France)
2002
Théâtre Garonne (Toulouse, France)
Festival d’Automne (Paris, France)
Théâtre de Lorient (Brittany, France)
Performance Space 122 (NYC, USA)
Press:
“The theatre of images for the new century is born: rapid, without concessions, violent and consuming itself at 100 miles an hour.” – Le Télégramme
“No description of “Flicker,” is likely to convey its ragged, witty lunacy.” – New York Times
“intriguingly unique and original… it’s unlike anything else in town.” – New York Post
“Wave of the future” – Time Out
“Thoughtfully designed and sharply executed, director Caden Manson’s production reasserts his claim as downtown’s new best thing.” – City Search
“…a breakneck immediacy that feels very contemporary.” – Village Voice
House of No More (2004-2007)
House Of No More
Description:
House of No More is the third and final part of a conceptual trilogy of Real Time Film begun with the works Shelf Life and Flicker. The performance starts with the reenactment of a crime told by a mother who thrusts herself on screen in her quest for her missing child. But simultaneously as this premise unfolds, the performers develop an antithesis– that the story is being faked as it is being created, dispelled at the same moment as it is conjured. As the characters dissolve into this corrupt transmission, becoming ghostly and multiplied across the surface of the “film,” what emerges is not a battle for the ownership of an absolute truth, but a thirst for a satiating lie.
The story of House of No More, as with all the parts of Real Time Film, is not told through the devices of conventional dialogue and narrative, but across an extended field of meaning in which the method of delivery contaminates the message. The image contradicts phrases, sounds obscure dialogue, the audience chooses what to see. The performance escapes across bounds: from creator to receiver, instigator to voyeur, it moves through states of being with an alarming and contemporary facility.
Video:
Creation History:
2004
Performance Space 122 (NYC)
Hebbel Theater (Berlin, Germany)
Théâtre Garonne/TNT (Toulouse, France)
Festival d’Automne à Paris (Paris, France)
Le Manege (Maubeuge, France)
Le Vie de Festival (Rome, Italy)
La Rose Des Vents (Villeneuve d’Asq, France)
2005
Wexner Center (Columbus, Ohio)
Art Rock Festival (Saint-Brieuc, France)
Festival de Otoño (Madrid, Spain)
Teatro La Fenice (Sinigalia, Italy)
Semaines Internationales de la Marironnette (Neuchatel, Switzerland)
Theatre de Nimes (Nimes, France)
2006
Temps d’Image at L’Usine C (Montreal, Canada)
Festival Mois Multi (Québec, Canada)
Donau Festival (Krems, Austria)
Scene Festival (Salzburg, Austria)
Press:
“Constructed as a breathless and disquieting narrative, Big Art Group’s House of No More is a spectacle as challenging as it is original, as freaked out as it is dazzling, far beyond traditional schemas and classical conceptions.” – Midi Libre
“Big Art Group breathtakingly unfolds this hour-long crash test like an infinitely decelerated car accident – or act of love?!” – Der Tagesspiegel
“gleefully subversive” – Time Out New York
“Big Art Group’s technologically dazzling House of No More is perfectly aligned with the vertiginous tempo of modern life.” – Village Voice
“mind-bending” – Digital City
“on the bleeding edge of video technique.” – New York Sun
“The show is raw and caustic even as it remains sleek and professional. ” – Theatre Mania
“House of No More takes theatre into the 21 century by marrying art house film with classic theatre; it’s a 3D movie you won’t need glasses to view” – Next Magazine
Funding:
Rockefeller MAP Fund, The DNA Project, a program of Arts International, made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation
Co-producers: Festival d’Automne (France), Theatré Gâronne (France), Maison de la Culture de Créteil (France), Hebbel Am Ufer (Germany), Caserne Mirabeau (France), Teatro di Roma – Vie dei Festival (Italy)
Co-commission:The Wexner Center For The Arts, National Performance Network, Performance Space 122
