Marvin Carlson

Mixed Media and Mixed Messages: Big Art Group's Exploration of the Sign

One of the most useful services that semiotic theory of the late twentieth century provided to the field of theatre studies was a critical approach that allowed the analysis of the extremely complex event of the theatre experience, wherein the spectator simultaneously receives a very wide variety of messages and stimuli on a number of channels, predominantly visual and aural, but potentially involving all five senses. Semiotic analysis offered a methodology dealing with the operations of these stimuli both individually and collectively, as they reinforced each other, in the tradition of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk; worked in opposition to each other, as recommended by Brecht in epic performance; or operated in an openended and free-form manner, as became common in much postmodern experimental performance. One such contemporary group that provides both a particular challenge to semiotic analysis as well as a useful illustration of the insights such analysis can bring to current experimental production is the Big Art Group, founded in New York in 1998 by Caden Manson, but now well known across America and in Germany. In this essay, I will consider the five productions so far created by this Group, their evolving aesthetic, and how this aesthetic opens itself to semiotic analysis. Big Art Group was founded with the stated aim of using “the language of media and blended states of performance in a unique form to build culturally transgressive and challenging new works.” 1 They have so far (until 2007) produced seven original works, several of which have toured widely both within the United States and abroad. Following their goal of expanding the formal boundaries of theatre, film, language, and the visual arts, these works may be seen as a series of challenging experiments, each one building upon and expanding the techniques previously developed. The Group’s first two works, Clearcut Catastrophe (1999) and The Balladeer (2000), were concerned with creating and developing an ensemble trained in physically rigorous presentational skills and dedicated to exploring new performance vocabularies. From the beginning Big Art Group, like its predecessor, America’s best-known experimental company, the Wooster Group, built work out of improvisation, experimental structure, task-based choreography, and quotations