Biography
Mission:
Originally conceived and informally organized in 1999, Big Art Group incorporated as a New York non-profit in June 2001 and has produced eight new major works, CLEARCUT, catastrophe (1999), The Balladeer (2000), Shelf Life (2001), Flicker (2002), House of No More (2004), DEAD SET #2 (2006), DEAD SET #3 (2007), and The People (2007). Big Art Group is an artist-run organization with a core group of members and project-to-project collaborators. Each piece is developed and first presented in New York City with the goal of bringing it to diverse audiences both nationally and internationally.Big Art Group uses the language of media in a unique narrative form while pushing the formal boundaries of theatre, film and visual arts to create culturally transgressive and challenging new works. Its goal is to develop innovative performances using original text, novel uses of technology, and suprising methods of communication. Big Art Group has been critically recognized for its “resonant and disturbing glimpses across borders” (Pew Fellowship Catalog) and for “certainly” achieving these goals “without pretentiousness and obfuscation.” (New York Times) As The New Republic Online stated, “Manson’s [approach] is right, and his will be a useful attack indeed.”
History and Major Accomplishments:
In the company’s brief history it has been successful in making work with New York based artists and promoting them on a national and international stage. Towards the end of 2000, development began on Big Art Group's production of Shelf Life. The script, about the commodity of happiness, was co-developed with the Real-Time Film technique. This process is a conceptual model conflating performance, television, and movies. Using live performance and video, Real-Time Film plays cinematic composition and controlled perspective against the verity of TV broadcast and the immediacy of live performance. It is a live movie that examines the use of image in entertainment, how we experience the image versus its manufacture, the split between surface and interior, and the different layers of truth. Shelf Life was performed at the Kraine Theatre in New York in March 2001. Shelf Life was hailed as “immediate and raw” (City Pages MN), “clever, jarring, and inventive” (Village Voice), and “as entertaining as it is profound.” (Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung).During Shelf Life, Big Art Group expanded and formalized three of our education and New York community-based programs: The Internship/Apprentice Program in which interns both local and foreign take part and train in all aspects of the development and production process; the Out There In Here Program in which free tickets are given to New York based non-profits serving under-represented and disadvantaged populations; and Back Talk in which post show audience discussions are lead by leaders in experimental theatre with the company and audience.
In June of 2001, Big Art Group was commissioned to perform a new work entitled Flicker at Performance Space 122 with help from the Jerome Foundation. Diane White joined the company as producer and Big Art Group began to position itself for national and international touring. As development began on Flicker, Caden Manson was awarded a 2001 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art for his work with Big Art Group. The company was trained in the Real-Time Film technique and the play opened in January of 2002. Flicker has been recognized as “impeccable” (Le Monde), “ragged, witty lunacy” (New York Times), and “the theatre of image of the new century” (Le Télégramme). Big Art Group was further approached by Soho Repertory Company to participate in their Research & Development series, a work-in progress showcase. Big Art Group chose to present the fully-realized Empty Island, incorporating new technical experiments in chroma-key video, layered imagery, and dense sound design. In the same month, Caden Manson received the 2002 Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
In Fall 2002 Big Art Group began touring its productions internationally with Flicker traveling to France to the Théâtre Garonne, Maison des Arts de Créteil as part of the Festival d’Automne à Paris, and the Théâtre de Lorient in Brittany (Nov-Dec 2002). In 2003, Big Art Group began touring internationally and nationally with Shelf Life. Big Art Group had the honor of being the first U.S. artists to attend the Pan Pan International Theatre Symposium in Dublin, Ireland. Shelf Life then continued on to the “Out There Festival” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the “P.S. 122 Fresh Terrain Performance Festival” at the University of Texas at Austin, the Wexner Art Center in Columbus, Ohio, and the “Off The Wall Series” at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Additionally, in the Fall of 2002, Big Art Group was awarded the DNA Project Grant, a three year initiative of Arts International Inc. with funds from the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
CM/B continued touring in 2003 –2006 to international and national festivals, receiving commissions and residencies while developing new work. The Company diversified its body of work with new productions, creating international coproductions in both New York and France and Germany with mixed casts of New York based ensemble members and international collaborators. In this the company has striven to adhere to its vision of diversity and diffusion, giving New York based actors the experience of creating abroad, interacting with the global arts community, and in turn bringing the benefit of that experience back to its home base and reinvesting in more artist- and works- development. Residencies and teaching workshops have included France, Canada, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Belgium. The company has continued to represent the vitality of its artists with lectures and after-show talk-backs, giving audiences and artists the chance to engage in issue-based dialogue based on the performances, both within New York performance series (APAP lectures, CUNY’s Prelude series) as well as international appearances (France’s Carte Blanche series as part of Act/French).
Caden Manson / Big Art Group was profiled in Le Monde as a new voice of American theatre and he has been critically named as a prominent new voice to emerge from New York experimental performance. In its short span, CM/B has shown the vitality of American and specifically New York based performance to a new generation of international and national audiences.
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