Big Art Group

© Katya Valentini

Caden Manson/Big Art Group is a New-York company of performers created in 1999. They use the media language and mix their performances to create new culturally transgressive pieces. Since its beginning, the band has been touring in the US and internationally, they produced 5 main plays among which are "Real Time Film" with "Shelf Life", "Flicker" and "House of No More".

As far as I am concerned, I ran into a performance of "Cinema Fury: The Imitation" by chance during the EXIT08 festival at the Créteil Art Center in April 2008. I had never witnessed anything like that. An incredible mix of musical, theatrical and video performances. A hardly intelligible storylilne on 4 screens facing each others, dismanteled and almost osbcene bodies (swollen lips, dangling tongues, outrageous dubbing), the use of sadistic carnival-inspired props (wigs, liquids), 2 dancers on crack in dresses that could have be stolen from Cher, a platinum-blonde singer in black lace whose body was 95 per covered in tatoos, a guitar player who wouldn't leave his Manson Halloween costume... In a nutshell: a true UFO hovering on Créteil for an hour of visual and sonic delirium perfectly masterized with inventive, sensitive, crazy and subversive artists. Leading them, Justin Bond, the extraordinarily facinating androgyne actor from the duet Kiki & Herb, also seen in Shortbus. We're torn between the crafty universe of Michel Gondry and the gorey burlesque art of Paul McCarthy... When the underground New York scence settles in France!

Big Art Group's MySpace: click here
Website: click here
Justin Bond's MySpace: click here