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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 a performance maker, curator (Contemporary Performance and Special Effects Festival) and educator. Through the company Big Art Group, their performance work creates radical queer narrative structures and embodiments to construct and aid transitory generative critical space for participants and audience. Their work is dense, fast, multi-layered, and traverses multiple genres and forms, often using interference, slippage, and disruption strategies. Manson’s work has been presented throughout 14 countries and over 50 cities in Europe, Asia, and North America. Their work has been co-produced by the Vienna Festival, Festival d’Automne a Paris, Hebbel Am Ufer, Rome’s La Vie de Festival, PS122, and Wexner Center for The Arts. Caden is a Foundation For Contemporary Art Fellow, Pew Fellow, and a MacDowell Fellow. Their writing, with Jemma Nelson, can be found in the publications PAJ, Theater Magazine, Theater der Zeit, and Theater Journal. Manson is the Director of The Theatre Program at Sarah Lawrence College, BA, MFA.

Editor: Jemma Nelson is a co-founder 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 artist opportunities, performances, creations, artists, touring, and theory
• Members – join a growing global network of artists, curators, venues, and scholars
• Artists – links to artists and companies creating contemporary performance
• Festivals – links to festivals of contemporary performance
• Venues – links to venues that present contemporary performance