Summary
Organization name
Control Group Productions
other names
CGP
2008
Tax id (EIN)
26-3928780
Category
Arts, Culture & Humanities
Organization Size
Medium Organization
Address
1801 Brentwood St.Lakewood, CO 80214
Jefferson County, CO, US
We create extraordinary live art experiences - immersive, site-specific, multi-disciplinary, collaborative. We drive career growth and artistic innovation in the local arts community. We reach across the metro area, with every event created site-specifically, and many partnered events each year.
Testimonials
"The conceptual breadth of Control Group's work is formidable, and well reflected in its multifarious applications, but finding an entry point is surprisingly smooth. There is no single answer, just as there is no single way to experience what it is to be a thinking, feeling, moving, creative, destructive human. As a viewer/participant, let go of the urge to define what is 'going on' and appreciate the multiplicity of active threads in the performed weaving."
- Jane Werle, Presenting Denver
"Like nothing else in Denver's dance scene. The pendulum of possibility
swings wildly from one instant to the next. It has its own distinct dream logic
that is so powerful, you might never want to wake up."
-Deanne Gartner, Presenting Denver
"The motion-based performances dreamed up by Patrick Mueller and Control Group Productions cross so many disciplinary lines that it's hard to know what to call them, and perhaps it's ridiculous to even try to pin it down."
-Susan Froyd, Westword Magazine
"Weirder than anything I ever seen a hobo do." Special Lieutenant Cayle England, Denver Police Dept. (no citation issued)
"I'd take that over a Penske Truck full of models any day!" Mark Sink, visual artist
Mission
Control Group Productions creates expeditionary performance. We use artistic research and development to cultivate new connections between people, place, and practice, offering audiences transformative embodied experiences. We elevate vital voices in our performing arts community by gathering and sharing resources that nurture artists' work and careers.
Background Statement
WHERE WE ARE NOW
Control Group is moving into 2024 by continually growing into our promise of making socially relevant and innovative live art experiences made through deep collaboration with our communities.
Our 2024 programming focuses on:
1. Evolving to make performance art for today’s ever-changing audience and world. We are focusing on making work informed by the needs of our collaborators, our audiences, and our world.
2. The production of 4 new shows, touching on topics of the prison-industrial complex, exploitation in the art world, healing from settler-colonialism, and the history of gentrification on Colfax Avenue.
3. Deepening our Artist Services programming in collaboration with our artists to create programming that is made for and by our ever-expanding group of collaborators.
You can find updates about our current / upcoming programming at:
controlgroupproductions.org/2023-2024
WHO WE ARE
We are a Colorado-based, globally-faced platform for contemporary performance research, production, distribution, and advocacy. With a revolving team of extraordinary artists, we pursue deep collaboration, rigorous research & development, and critical innovations in form and contents.
Our work establishes intersections between immersive performance, site-specific creative place-making, and social engagement. Every project takes place at a unique location, and engages the surrounding community and local history into the creative process. We aim light up artistically under-served areas and topics, and create exceptional experiences that take audiences beyond the confines of their default perspectives.
Our work is delicately calibrated and complex - multi-disciplinary, sensory rich, transformational. It reflects an open-ended moral dimension that, without preaching or pushing, enhances empathy and understanding of others' experiences. Each work takes a unique form - a hike, a bus trip, a tour of an abandoned slaughterhouse, an immersive transformation of a traditional theater.
We use our sites to create uniquely rich contexts for our guests' experiences. Our artistic research focuses on the interface between person and environment - sensory-perceptual matrices, subtle energetic topographies, the limits of individual control and agency, malleabilities in the boundaries between things. The work freely intersects reality and imagination, interlacing visceral sensory experiences, fundamental structural reconfiguration, and richly evocative action and imagery, toward the construction of precarious utopian proposals for confrontation and transcendence.
HISTORY
Founded in 2008 by artistic director Patrick Mueller, Control Group has created 20 major works to date, ranging from stage performances to site-specific, installation, and film projects.
Through our Artist Services program Control Group has founded two Denver venues - The Packing House Center for the Arts (2008-10) and work|space Denver (2011-15) - where we incubated new works, presented events by dozens of local and touring artists, hosted artists in residence, and provided other services to the local professional community. The company subsequently entered a multi-year artist residency at Colorado Conservatory of Dance, where we have co-administered much of our Artist Services programming. Since moving into our Home Studio in Lakewood, we have fully embraced a nomadic presenting and programming model, with events and activities reaching across the Denver-Boulder metro area, with a particular focus on under-served areas in Denver and Adams counties.
Control Group has received project and commissioning support from Open Dance Project (Houston, TX), the Dance Initiative (Carbondale, CO), The Biennial of the Americas, Denver Theatre District, the Denver Office of Arts & Venues, and BINDERY|space; and its work has been presented by RedLine Gallery, Naropa University, Dance Initiative Carbondale, American Dance Festival's MFA program, Boulder Fringe Festival, and others. Our work is supported by Colorado Creative Industries and the National Endowment for the Arts, Colorado's Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, the Denver Foundation, the Broomfield Community Foundation, the Dugas Family Foundation, the Gilbert Family Trust, and other foundations, trusts, and individual donors.
Media gallery
Organization Data
Lakewood, CO 80214