Big Art Group Shelf Life

"A satirical circus...a whirling send-up of materialism run amok."
--Back Stage

See Shelf Life for a zoom-in, close-up, multimedia view of the next generation of imaginative talent in theater. "The main boundary to attack is the idea that theater sucks."--Caden Manson, Big Art Group


Brash young director Caden Manson's Big Art Group has won rabid fans in New York's Downtown scene with ingenious and hysterical productions that work as much like live-action films as like theater productions.

Big Art Group's performances resemble shadowplays for a cyber generation. They employ a battery of home video cameras to build their barrage of wacky lo-fi imagery and split your attention between the multiscreen video projections that front the stage and the antics of the actors partially screened behind them. You are pulled into a bizarrely beguiling cinematic panorama unlike anything you've ever experienced.

But that's just the mechanical side of Big Art Group. The loopily engaging yet pointed shows are themselves the real treat. Shelf Life skewers America's rampant obsession with possessions, parodying our shop-til-you-drop consumerism through the giddy interplay of its cast of wigged out Gen-Yers keen to acquire things, more things...and maybe each other.