Urban Honking

Tuesday, May 15

7:00pm Big Art Group Lecture @ PICA

Renowned performance ensemble Big Art Group brings their culturally transgressive, technology-bending style to town to create a new work with the Portland community. In May, the company will be in residence at PICA, recording interviews with a cross-section of local residents for The People—Portland, a monumental, outdoor, live theater and video piece debuting at this year’s Time-Based Art Festival. With interview topics spanning the big ideas around democracy, justice, and community, the performance will blend this recorded digital “chorus” with a highly mediatized live take on the Greek tragedy The Oresteia.

While in town working on the The People, Big Art Group Artistic Director Caden Manson will give a free public lecture on the company’s blend of high and low technology, marginal and mainstream culture, and the questions they pose about contemporary experience.

Big Art Group has produced 12 original works: CLEARCUT, catastrophe! (1999), The Balladeer (2000), Shelf Life (2001), Flicker (2002), House of No More (2004), Dead Set (2006-Serial Project), The People (2007-Serial Project), The Sleep (2007), The Imitation (2008), SOS (2008), Cityrama (2010-Serial Project), and Broke House (2012). Through these works, the company has pioneered the integrated spectacle of ‘Real-Time Film,’ a hybrid of film and theatre recombines formal ideas of performance through the use of simultaneous live performance and live video, complex choreography, and digital puppetry. Big Art Group exists in the contemporary stream of post-dramatic performance, wherein traditional narratives and established performer-audience relationships have been opened up to create new possibilities for discovery.

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)
415 SW 10th Ave, Suite 300
Portland OR 97205

Free Admission
All Ages
Tues . May 15 . 7-8:30 pm