Broke House by the Big Art Group: Queer Transgressions on the Contemporary New York Stage
The Big Art Group has joined the New York performance scene since 1999, exploring primarily with the effects of multimedia on stage. They developed acting techniques combined with video, called Real Time Film, offering fresh questions about performing in the 21st century. In Broke House (2012), Jemm...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/angles, |
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| Auteur principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Anglais |
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Angles
2020
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | The Big Art Group has joined the New York performance scene since 1999, exploring primarily with the effects of multimedia on stage. They developed acting techniques combined with video, called Real Time Film, offering fresh questions about performing in the 21st century. In Broke House (2012), Jemma Nelson, Caden Manson and their actors continue the exploration on the meaning of the body by mixing two plots and modes of representation. The show, based on improvisations around Chekhov’s Three Sisters and a documentary film, among other things, derails normative codes of reception and helps us question the instability of the meaning of the body, which is criss-crossed by shifting epistemologies. The result is a performance that stages fluxes of non-normative desires constantly oscillating between embodied subjectivities and evanescent illusions of the body. The powerful visual quality of the play, enhanced by huge screens, clashes with the makeshift scenery and hyperreal acting in order to reveal the violence that underpins the redefinition of the body on stage in our neoliberal, digital age. By looking closely at the structure of the piece and its scenography, I chart how the flesh and the digital interact through cinematic and theatrical tricks. Further, I highlight how the Group delineates a corporeality embroiled in social, esthetic, and phantasmatic structures and patterns by arguing that they deploy new forms of queer representations. Ultimately, I want to suggest how a phenomenology of the technological body helps grasp how the theatrical corporeality becomes illusory and elusive through queer technology and queer camp practices. |
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