New Work – Broke House Opens Thursday Jan 5th, 2012 at 8:30pm (NYC)

THREE WAYS TO SEE THE WORK

#1 (Large)
American Realness Festival at ABRONS ARTS CENTER PLAYHOUSE
466 Grand Street / tickets $15 / AbronsArtsCenter.org
January 5, 2012 8:30pm
January 7, 2012 9:30pm
January 12, 2012 8:30pm
January 13, 2012 8:30pm
January 14, 2012 7:00pm

#2 (Medium)
Interactive Installation at La MaMa Galleria
6 East 1st Street New York, NY
JAN 6, 2012 6-8PM
FREE

#3 (Small)
Installation at La MaMa Galleria
6 East 1st Street New York, NY
Jan 7, 2012 noon – 5pm
FREE

Broke House is a new group performance from Caden Manson / Big Art Group and follows a narrative about the residents of a house and their hanger-on, once a documentary filmmaker arrives to capture their lives. On a skeletal set webbed with video cameras, the characters try to recall their given roles as inevitably the foundations of their dreams collapse, and they are thrown into the desert of their own futures. Part comedy, part ritual, part love spell.

The Performance explores the process of construction, when that process becomes sharply interrupted by historical events, and dissolves into the shapelessness of an aftermath. Those processes that were “building” previous to the play’s beginning include a life, a family, architecture, or a system of beliefs, an economy of values, and the creation of the performance itself. But when events intervene— events like collapse, upheaval, disaster, abandonment, forgetting, fear, and strife— all the raw materials and the players themselves become deformed into a new formlessness, and enter a transitional state of potentiality. Like the pause loop in a video game, Broke House takes place in this marginal time zone.

Like all of Big Art Group’s works, Broke House offers our meditation on the current states of America, which we believe have been in flux for at least as long as our ensemble has been up and running. Beyond the topical symptoms of foreclosure crises, credit crises, occupy movements and extremist rhetoric, we suppose that the metaphorical heart of the country has been suffering, and perhaps has decided to rebuild the body that surrounds it.