About

Welcome to Contemporary Performance, a social network and community organizing platform providing artists, presenters, scholars and festivals a platform to meet, share work, and collaborate. 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.

Editor In Chief: Caden Manson is Editor and Curator of Contemporary Performance Network and co-founder and artistic director of Big Art Group, a New York City performance company founded in 1999. The company uses the language of media and blended states of performance in a unique form to build culturally transgressive and challenging new works. Since its inception, it has toured nationally and internationally and produced critically acclaimed works including the ‘Real Time Film’ trilogy Shelf Life, Flicker, House of No More; SOS; and its reality-based theatre series The People. He has co-created, directed, video designed and scenographed 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, Montreal and Bern; 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. He lives in Pennsylvania and runs his company in NYC.

Editor: Jemma Nelson is co-founding member of Big Art Group and co-editor of Contemporary Performance. He grew up in the heart of the Silicon Valley of California, studying art history and computer music at CCRMA; and contributed to one of the first immersive CD-ROMs, The Residents’ Freak Show. He has written and composed sound for Rampart, SOS, The People, Cinema Fury series, Dead Set#2 and #3, House of No More, Empty Island, Flicker, and Shelf Life, and has published several articles about contemporary performance. He makes collaborative political pop music in New York, and his visual work has been exhibited in Performa festival and galleries in Europe and the US. Jemma Nelson received a 2009 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

In this site you will find:

• News – blog posts on performances, creations, artists, touring, and theory
• Members – join a growing global network of artists, curators, venues, and scholars
• Vote – vote for the next member to be featured on the network
• Resources –
• Artists – links to artists and companies creating contemporary performance
• Festivals – links to festivals of contemporary performance
• Venues – links to venues that present contemporary performance
• Writings – links to artist’s and critical thinker’s blogs
• Shop – help support by purchasing books, t-shirts, and bags
• T-shirts and Bags – logo merchandise
• Books – a curated list of books about contemporary performance