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January 10, 2005

real-time film

BigArtGroup.jpg

resynthesis of (per)form(ance)

Caden Manson's Big Art Group developed "Real-Time Film" as a conceptual model conflating performance, television, and movies. Using live performance and video, it plays cinematic composition and controlled perspective against the 'verity' of TV broadcast and the immediacy of live performance. It is a live movie that examines the use of image in entertainment, how we experience the image versus its manufacture, the split between surface and interior, and the different layers of truth.

In "Real Time Film" the actors work in front of three stationary cameras, and what those cameras see is projected on a three-segment shoulder-high screen running the length of the stage between the audience and the actors; the performers' heads, shoulders, feet and the projections of their actions are all that's visible. Watching the screen, the audience sees a movie. Watching the performers, the audience sees the making of the movie. Bodies morph into one another and limbs attach and reattach to different characters. It enables an Asian woman to play a white woman with a black man’s arm. The form short-circuits the audience’s ability to discern gender, race, and sexuality; dissecting the semantics of everyday visual communication; and becoming a new way of relating the fluidity and manufacture of identity.

The technical analysis and resynthesis of the form carries through to the infrastructure of the text, the reestablishment of character, and the nature in which expectations of drama are met and deflected. Language is made transparent and meaningless and simultaneously overloaded with possible meanings, and traditional methods of establishing and acting character are exploded and then recombined in the attempt to generate new modes of identity and identification. Narrative plays with the idea of development and frustration, intentionally exposing circular patterns and the inconsistency of structure while using conflict/resolution to push forward.

Posted by michelle at January 10, 2005 07:10 PM

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