Development
Founded by director Caden Manson in 1999, Big Art Group has produced seven 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" (2007). The first two works, Clearcut Catastrophe and The Balladeer, explored the development of new vocabularies for performance and trained the ensemble in physically rigorous methods of stagecraft. Clearcut Catastrophe fused ideas from Chekhov's Three Sisters and the documentary Grey Gardens through methods of improvisation. These experiments evolved into a trilogy of works: Shelf Life, Flicker and House of No More. In these pieces, Manson invented an integrated spectacle which he dubbed ‘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.
Thematically, the trilogy began with an acidic critique of consumerism with Shelf Life, which also marks author Jemma Nelson's debut. The sister piece, Flicker, used two storylines to create a linked examination of violence and commodity. The trilogy concluded with House of No More, which dismantled ideas of theatrical narrative, and attacked the idea of spectacle.
In 2006 the company began a series of experimental video art, musical collaborations and reality performances, Dead Set #2 and #3 and The People. Dead Set #2 and #3 continued Big Art Group's experimentation with live theatre and video, set and costume design to comment on themes of trauma and popular culture. The People was an expansion of real-time film that moved the theatre to the street, combining local participants, documentary research and site-specific creations and also fusing avant-garde performance with community expression. Retelling a contemporary version of the Oresteia, The People was simultaneously projected and broadcast into the public square of the Italian town of Polverigi.
Caden Manson has been recognized as a Pew Fellow for his work with Big Art Group. Major funding for the company include grants received from the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Production fund, The Greenwall Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Art and the Florence Gould Foundation. In the United States, Big Art Group has performed at such venues as Performance Space 122, The Kitchen, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Walker Art Center, and REDCAT. Performers include Heather Litteer, Farrad Mullins, and Theo Kogan. Their work is also in the permanent collection of the Yale Drama Library.
Read more about this topic: Big Art Group
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“John B. Watson, the most influential child-rearing expert [of the 1920s], warned that doting mothers could retard the development of children,... Demonstrations of affection were therefore limited. “If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning.””
—Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)
“Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)