Big Art Group: Flesh Tone April 15, 2010

Transgressing the formal boundaries of theatre, film and visual arts, Big Art Group is an internationally acclaimed, New York-based experimental performance ensemble. To celebrate 10 years of innovative work, they take over all three Abrons performance spaces with projects past, present, and future.

Big Art Group’s new project Flesh Tone is told through hybrid, hallucinatory storytelling influenced by steely Hollywood thrillers and filtered though the company’s breathtaking mediated performance techniques, Real Time Film and Green Screen Performance. A character-driven critique of the American way of looking at the world, Flesh Tone turns the visual economy of the U.S. into an acid bath of self-exposure. Confronting social issues of economic and environmental degradation, a war-scarred national psyche, and transformed bodies, Flesh Tone queries Image-America about a possible path to reconciliation with its own transmogrified reflection.

The performance delves deeper into the group's trademark techniques to create a theater in which action, re-enactment, and special effect create a participatory spectacle with the “active editor” audience member. For Big Art Group, the theatrical event is based not on illusion, but on a synthesis of simulation and impersonation, on the ritualized action of recreating a readable, multi-layered Image Theatre. In the Playhouse.

In the Abrons’ Underground Theater, two four-channel video installations, SOS-Animals and The Imitation, will loop daily from noon to 10 pm.

Official Website: http://www.abronsartscenter.org