By Davida Singer
Director Caden Manson is fascinated by “things that break and narratives that dodge”, and since he founded Big Art Group in 1999, he’s been creating original shows that do just that. Their latest production is “House of No More”, with previews beginning at PS 122 on January 3rd.
“If I could say what something is really all about, I wouldn’t make it,” says Manson, 31, who did a stint of downtown work after coming to New York from the University of Texas. “My goal has been to make contemporary language for live performance. I had seen a lot of multi-media theater, and it was boring to me. The video had been decorative and works always used deconstruction. I wanted something new that allowed the audience to be conversant with the images- something that invited them in. For example, with one of our past shows, “Flicker”, we made a fake movie, and showed the audience how we created those images.”
Big Art Group is composed of a loose team of about forty actors and designers, led by Manson, who also does the video installations. The company does one show a year, and has developed an extensive touring schedule, both in the U.S. and throughout Europe.
“The amount of touring we do is because of grants and other goals of mine-to expand the audience and to pay performers,” Manson explains. “Our challenge is touring and trying to make new work at the same time. Plus, recently it’s been more difficult to get fringe jobs and survive, but it’s all very exciting.”
“With text and sound by Jemma Nelson, the “House of No More” project began eighteen months ago during a company residency in Toulouse, and involved the utilization of French actors there for the production’s first run.
“This show is a step forward in real time technology,” notes the director. “It’s panoramic, with four large screens, and the actors acting among them. You see them live, in cinematic fashion. We use film lighting, with the actors ‘on location’, running mixers. The sound is also complicated – live from a computer- with hundreds and hundreds of sound cues. The narrative is a woman searching for her missing daughter, but I feel that’s a ruse. It’s really an extended chase sequence, a chase movie about how we are many people and just one at the same time.”
Can he define the essence of the piece?
“I would say, don’t trust it,” Manson responds. “If you go looking at it like a regular narrative, you’ll miss a lot. It’s really the story and who’s making it, and how. Who’s in control of what’s being made. Hopefully, when you see it and you get to the ending you’ll want to see it again. We do have many people who come back because there’s so much to take in the first time. And it’s all slippery like our lives.”
According to Manson, Big Art Group takes pride in challenging the way people look at things, especially “the actual mechanics of vision”, and the way we respond to the world and events around us.
“Today, we’re voracious image eaters, we can’t get enough,” he says. “The interesting thing about visuals is that now pictures often become trash-things we throw away. But they definitely affect us, and all of that is important to me. Our work is quick paced, and in the end, it’s really about what we’re trying to say and that slipperiness of meaning. It’s part of our time, just like the show, which doesn’t fit into video or theater, but lives in the margins of both. Things change and don’t fit into boxes anymore. Now there’s more openness to it all, and to all of us.”
