BIG ART GROUP brings SOS to the Kitchen
Caden sent me this weeks ago and I totally spaced. Sorry! Put on your media confusion multi post trans everything performance spectacle drinking hat for the latest from NYC’s much-acclaimed genre-defying art criminals.
“The theatre of images for the new century is born: rapid, without concessions, violent and consuming itself at 100 miles an hour.” Le Télégramme (Brest)
“As challenging as it is original, as freaked out as it is dazzling, far beyond traditional schemas and classical conceptions.” Midi Libre (Montpellier)
The always-provocative New York ensemble has won an international reputation for pushing the limits of performance and video art by lacing its original hall-of-mirrors multimedia stagecraft with flurries of livewire choreographed action. Its latest opus, SOS, jumps off from the primal themes of The Rite of Spring to stage their own contemporary rite of rebirth through a panoptic live video installation. SOS is an investigation into the nature of sacrifice within a supersaturated, hyper-acquisitive society. Set in a theatrical space that plays with the idea of representation, where the cables and cameras of surveillance appear as a forest of technology, the performance unwinds through overlapping abstract narratives. Animals (played by actors in plushy costumes and body mounted cameras) pushed from their native habitat turn on each other in a hopeless contest for survival. Televised Trans-Variant Revolutionaries from the Realness Liberation Front broadcasting in a skeletal studio implode under the pressure and failure of their own rhetoric. Social networking addicts enmeshed in a self-created universe seek escape from a tightening web of perception. As these scenarios vibrate against one another, the action transforms into a celebration of renewal though chaos.
Big Art Group/SOS – March 19-21 & 26-28, 2009 at 8pm
The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
TICKETS:
or by phone at 212.255.5793 ext. 11 Tue-Sat, 2-6pm
Big Art Group is an internationally acclaimed New York based experimental performance ensemble that uses language and media to push formal boundaries of theatre, film and visual arts. The company creates culturally transgressive works and innovative performances using experimental text, technology, and scenography. Founded by director Caden Manson and writer Jemma Nelson in 1999 Big Art Group has produced ten original works: CLEARCUT, catastrophe(1999), The Balladeer(2000), Shelf Life(2001),Flicker(2002), House of No More(2004), Dead Set #2 and #3(2006-7), The People-Italy (2006), The People -Germany(2007), Cinema Fury: The Sleep(2007), Cinema Fury: The Imitation(2008) andSOS(2008). In these pieces 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, puppetry and autobiography. ”. Manson and his company have received profiles in performance literature (Le Monde, Mouvement, Digicult, Theatre Forum, Jump Cut, and Theatre Heute), and are included in the book Theatre In The Last Half of The 20th Century. The company has toured nationally and internationally and received multiple invitations from leading festivals and presenters Festival d’Automne à Paris (France), REDCAT (USA), Theatre der Welt (Germany), Rotterdamse Schouwburg (The Netherlands), Festival de Otoño (Spain), Kaaitheatre (Belgium), La Vie De Festival (Italy), Usine C (Canada), Trafo (Hungry), DTW, PS122, and The Kitchen (NYC).http://www.bigartgroup.com