Rhizome presents Cinema Fury, an action-media performance created by Caden Manson / Big Art Group. Organized by Nick Hallett, Cinema Fury will be an immersive installation and a participatory performance that is designed to bring the audience into the action.
In Cinema Fury, Big Art Group will explore the idea of corruption in the information age, and the chaotic possibilities that arise through errors, glitches, and interruptions within digital transmissions. By reinterpreting models of data transmission and decomposition as performance strategies, Cinema Fury opens new interpretive pathways to understanding the process of contemporary “media-ization.” Concepts of transmogrification, both of the folkloric and post-digital varieties, recur throughout. Big Art Group will draw on material from two upcoming major productions: Flesh Tone (2010) and No Show (2011).
Big Art Group is an internationally acclaimed New York based-experimental performance ensemble that uses language and media to push formal boundaries of theater, film, and visual arts. The company creates culturally transgressive works and innovative performances using original text, technology, and experimental performance forms. Founded by director Caden Manson and writer Jemma Nelson in 1999, Big has produced eleven original works, CLEARCUT, catastrophe (1999) The Balladeer (2000) Shelf Life (2001) Flicker (2002) House of No More (2004) Dead Set #2 and #3 (2006-07) The People—Italy (2007) The Sleep (2007) The People—Germany (2008) The Imitation (2008), and SOS (2008). In these pieces Manson invented the integrated spectacle “real-time film,” a hybrid of film and theater in which actors recombined formal ideas of performance through the use of simultaneous acting on stage and live video, using complex choreography, language, and video manipulation. The work blends high and low technology, marginal and mainstream culture, and blunt investigation to push performance boundaries, and in a larger sense to drive questions about contemporary experience. Big will be presenting its next group work, Flesh Tone, from April 15-18, 2010 at Abrons Arts Center.