Caden Manson is co-founder of Big Art Group and Editor and Curator of ContemporaryPerfromance.com. He has co-created, directed, video and set designed 11 Big Art Group productions. Manson has shown video installations in Austria and Germany; performed PAIN KILLER in Berlin, Singapore and Vietnam; Taught in Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Montreal; his ensemble has been co-produced by the Vienna Festival, Festival d’Automne a Paris, Hebbel Am Ufer, Rome’s La Vie de Festival, Theatre Garonne, and Wexner Center for The Arts. He is a recipient of the 2001 Foundation For Contemporary Art Fellowship, is a 2002 Pew Fellow and received a 2009 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

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 original text, technology and experimental methods of communication. 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(2007) Cinema Fury: The Sleep(2007) Cinema Fury: The Imitation(2008) and SOS(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 task based choreography, digital puppeteering, cinematic framing, and delivery of dense texts. The company’s works exists in the contemporary stream of postdramatic performance, wherein traditional narratives and established performer-audience relationships have been opened up to create possibilities of innovative discovery. The work blends high and low technology, marginal and mainstream culture, and blunt investigation to push boundaries of the performance field, and in a larger sense to drive questions about contemporary experience.


Selected touring history:
Wiener Festwochen (Austria), Festival d’Automne a Paris (France), Hebbel am Ufer (Germany), Kaiitheatre (Belgium) , The Kitchen (NYC), PS 122 (NYC), REDCAT (LA), Temps d’image at L’Usine C (Canada), Theater der Welt Festiva (Germany)l, The Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis) , The Wexner Center for The Arts (Columbus), La Vie de Festival (Italy), Trafo (Hungary). Teatro Central (Spain), Project Arts Center (Ireland), New Territories (Scotland), La Batie (Switzerland), Schouwburg (The Netherlands)

Contemporary Performance Blog and Network
The Contemporary Performance Blog and Network are resources for artists, scholars and audiences. The term Contemporary Performance is used to describe hybrid performance works and artists that travel between the fields of Experimental Theatre, Dance, Video Art, Visual Art, Music Composition and Performance Art without adhering to one specific field’s practice. The CP Blog was created August 1, 2009 and the Network was created in July 2010.