Founded by director Caden Manson and playwright Jemma Nelson in 1999, Big Art Group has produced original works, CLEARCUT, catastrophe (1999), The Balladeer (2000), Shelf Life (2001), Flicker (2002), House of No More (2004), Dead Set #2 and #3 (2006-7),"The Sleep", "The Imitation", "The People" (2007), "S.O.S."
[1] The first two works, Clearcut Catastrophe and The Balladeer, explored the development of new vocabularies for performance blending film and theatrical references and trained the ensemble in physically rigorous methods of stagecraft.
Thematically, the trilogy began with an acidic critique of consumerism with Shelf Life, which also marks author Jemma Nelson's writing debut.
In 2006 the company began a series of experimental video art, musical collaborations and reality performances, Dead Set #2 and #3, "The Sleep","The Imitation" and The People.
The People was an expansion of real-time film that moved the theatre to the street, combining local participants, documentary research and site-specific creations and - fusing avant-garde performance with community expression.
[3] Combining a large scale video installation, dense text, sound, and fast pace, the play explored ideas of saturation and sacrifice in contemporary society.