In Performance: Big Art Group TAKES OVER Abrons Art Center April 15-18, 2010(NYC)

To celebrate 10 years of innovative work, Big Art Group takes over all three Abrons Art Center performance spaces with projects past, present, and future.

April 15-18, 2010
Abrons Art Center
Henry Street Settlement
466 Grand Street, NYC
t:212.598.0400 f:212.505.8329
www.abronsartscenter.org

10 Years of Big Art Video

THE SLEEP in the Experimental (NYC Premiere)

April 15-18, 2010 at 7:00pm
$15

The Sleep mixes early cinema techniques, magic lantern, concept album and Big Art Group’s Real Time Film technique into a live see-though movie adapted from M. P. Shiel’s 1901 story, “The Purple Cloud,” in which a lone explorer races to the North Pole while a poison purple cloud covers the earth. His subsequent return to the remnants of civilization drives him into a crisis of being, in a classic “last man” adventure that eerily presages catastrophic climate change. Live music by Theo Kogan, Sean Pierce, and Jemma Nelson.

FLESH TONE in the Playhouse (Preview)

April 15-18, 2010 at 8:30pm
$15

Big Art Group’s new project Flesh Tone is told through hybrid, hallucinatory storytelling influenced by steely Hollywood thrillers and filtered though the company’s breathtaking mediated performance techniques, Real Time Film and Green Screen Performance. A character-driven critique of the American way of looking at the world, Flesh Tone turns the visual economy of the US into an acid bath of self-exposure. Confronting social issues of economic and environmental degradation, a war-scarred national psyche, and transformed bodies, Flesh Tone queries Image-America about a possible path to reconciliation with its own transmogrified reflection. This live performance spans cinema, visual art, and spectacle in an utterly unique, compelling event.

Flesh Tone returns to the conceptual and performative model of Real Time Film and Live Green Screen Performance technique the group pioneered in 2001 with its trilogy of works Shelf Life, Flicker, and House of No More. Flesh Tone delves deeper into the techniques and the questions these hybrid forms raise, moving beyond the Film-Theatrical hybrid of the group’s earlier works to create a theatre of mediated information in which action, re-enactment and special effect create a participatory spectacle with the “active editor” audience member. For Big Art Group, the theatrical event is based not on illusion, but on a synthesis of simulation and impersonation, on the ritualized action of recreating a readable, multi-layered Image Theatre.

2 FOUR CHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATIONS in the Underground

SOS/Animals was filmed on location in the industrial district of Greenpoint Brooklyn with the Animals from Big Art Group’s 2009 group work SOS.

The Imitation is based on the 2008 group work by the same name and features singers Theo Kogan and Justin Bond.

April 15-18, 2010 Noon to 10pm
FREE

Ticket Info

TAKE OVER (Both shows in one day)
package discounts the admission to see both The Sleep (7:00pm) and Flesh Tone (8:30pm).
$25

THE SLEEP at 7:30 pm (April 15-18, 2010)
$15

FLESH TONE at 8:30 pm (April 15-18, 2010
$15

OPENING NIGHT VIP TAKE OVER
Package covers admission to see both The Sleep (7:00pm) and Flesh Tone (8:30pm) on opening night, April 15. VIPs receive a Big Art Group gift bag, an invitation to the after-performance toast with the company, and free admission to the after party at the Delancey Bar, 168 Delancey Street.
$100