SOS at The Kitchen in NYC March 2009

The always-provocative New York ensemble, BIG ART GROUP, has won an international reputation for pushing the limits of performance and video art by lacing its original hall-of-mirrors multimedia stagecraft with flurries of livewire choreographed action. Its latest opus, SOS, jumps off from the primal themes of The Rite of Spring to stage their own contemporary rite of rebirth through a panoptic live video installation. SOS is an investigation into the nature of sacrifice within a supersaturated, hyper-acquisitive society. Set in a theatrical space that plays with the idea of representation, where the cables and cameras of surveillance appear as a forest of technology, the performance unwinds through overlapping abstract narratives. Animals (played by actors in plushy costumes and body mounted cameras) pushed from their native habitat turn on each other in a hopeless contest for survival. Televised Trans-Variant Revolutionaries from the Realness Liberation Front broadcasting in a skeletal studio implode under the pressure and failure of their own rhetoric. Social networking addicts enmeshed in a self-created universe seek escape from a tightening web of perception. As these scenarios vibrate against one another, the action transforms into a celebration of renewal though chaos.