Art Fags of the Week: Big Art Group

What do you get when you mix drag, live video projection, balloon art, sharp knives, animal costumes, and REALNESS with a bunch of rapid-fire technological and pop-culture references? You get Big Art Group, in particular their latest touring piece S.O.S., which combines all of the above along with the talents of a troup of talented and hilarious performers. (Clip after the jump.)

Big Art Group was founded in New York by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson in 1999, and they've been creating new ensemble performance works and touring them around the U.S and Europe (mostly in Europe) for the past decade. We saw them earlier this year in San Francisco, and they just wrapped up a performance of S.O.S. in Italy, so hopefully they're headed back.

The piece is incredibly hard to describe. Multiple screens cover the rear of the stage, and the projected images of the actors -- often from chest-mounted cameras -- are as much a part of the show as the performers themselves. Green screens are used liberally to created kaleidoscopic, psychedelic images behind talking heads, and the dialogue in many parts is drenched in giddy references to the web (Facebook/Myspace/you name it), material goods, brand names, and drugs (our favorite euphemism: Christie Tinkle Tina). There is also some amazing drag, fantastic balloon sculpture, a repeating motif about REALNESS, and a group of lost animals wandering a forbidding forest and ultimately killing each other.

Below, a clip in which two of the green-screen technophiles reach an operator the top secret Realness Liberation Front. It doesn't translate *all that well* to YouTube but is funny nonetheless.