Control Group Summer Intensive

Mondays/Wednesdays/Fridays June 17 – 28
10am-1pm + 10 hours of open studio time

Cost: $150 / $120 online early-bird (before June 1)
Partial scholarships available for movement professionals

Dive into Control Group’s process and aesthetics in a two week intensive combining movement technique and dance-theatre composition. Explore a unique choreographic process, hone technical and performance skills, and present a work in progress at work|space at the end of the intensive.

Open to students and professionals, the workshop takes us inside Control Group’s core process. From a broadly based physical preparation aimed at clarity and versatility, we take on individual tasks and assignments that engage a wide spectrum of performance practices and approaches (multiple movement styles, voice and character, visual design and spatial interaction). Individual feedback sessions challenge participants to capitalize on the unique strengths in their work, and collaborative structures between students allows us to examine how meaning forms and mutates through context and sequence. The intensive culminates with an informal work-in-progress showing on Friday afternoon.

TECHNIQUE: Our company class approaches dance technique functionally, focusing on cleaning fundamental coordinations and attaining movement facility and ease through exercises that balance control and propulsion with release and momentum. Anatomy and energetics underpin the practice from a gentle, introspective preparation through challenging phrase-work demanding fierce athleticism and refined artistry.

COMPOSITION: Control Group takes an open intermedia approach to creating work. Each process develops a unique vocabulary and aesthetic, driven by the concept and by the individual voices involved. Action, image, object, and environment become malleable elements in a methodical process of generating and arranging materials into meaning.
Over two weeks we will dive into this process, with individual assignments and guidance, group sharing and feedback, and open lab time in the theater. Our goal is that each participant ends the intensive with a work-in-progress that they can share as the pre-show to the main event at work|space that weekend.

SHOWING: Details forthcoming, but we're planning on an early-evening showing in the theater on Friday June 28 - informal, but with basic lighting and sound tech. The showing will be followed by the weekend's main event, a dance work by CU grad Nathan Blackwell.

WHO SHOULD COME: The intensive is designed for dance and theater students and professionals. Some movement background is important, but the technique class is designed to be multi-level accessible, and provides training that supports many different pursuits in the performing arts.

Flow and Awareness / Moving TogetherSaturday
April 20, 12-4pm

A Workshop doubleheader led by Jens Bjerregaard (Mancopy Danse Kompagni, DK/LB)
$40 general / $30 for professional dancers (please RSVP)

A combination dance technique and partnering workshop for movers at all levels of training and experience.

The workshop aims at developing a sense of the inner physicality, where the movement is always initiated by a decision from the inside. In other words, we get aware of our bones and muscles structure, rely on our weight, use our free breathing and then comes the game with gravity – when do we give in and how much do we control?
Whether you’re a professional dancer or it’s your first time in a studio, this workshop offers you lots of dancing in a frame where you can feel free and safe to REALLY move your body!

COMPANY BIO
Mancopy Danse Kompagni, directed by Danish choreographer Jens Bjerregaard, has been working in Beirut, Lebanon for the last five years, building a dual identity and sense of home and place. The work, compositions by Bjerregaard and by other choreographers around the globe, seek fluid relationships with cultural and artistic structures that allow for new perspectives, greater accessibility, and global thinking.

Mancopy is in residency 4/14-4/22 at work|space Denver, offering performances and conducting outreach activities with local schools. The second international dance event curated by Control Group Productions, Mancopy’s tour offers Coloradoans a rare opportunity to engage with globally acclaimed artists working in the heart of global current events in the Middle East.

Control Group Audition, Company Class, Upcoming work|space Events, more…

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Control Group Productions EPIC Program
(Extraordinary Performance Importation and Circulation)
presents

Mancopy Danse Kompagni
Simple Moves
April 18-20 at 8pm

work|space Denver
2701 Lawrence St. 80205
$17 general admission / $14 advance tickets here

Simple Moves asks how we got to where we are. How can we understand the present not only as the sum of past decisions, but also an accumulation of shadows – of paths untaken, of potentials on the horizon, of current issues unresolved? Bjerregaard conjures these shadows of his past, present, and future, and seeks to transform them into energy, into movement in new directions. By turns autobiographical and metaphysical, the work rearranges the past to find a richer understanding of the present and future, for the performer and also for the audience.

Mancopy Danse Kompagni, directed by Danish choreographer Jens Bjerregaard, has been working in Beirut, Lebanon for the last five years, building a dual identity and sense of home and place. The work, compositions by Bjerregaard and by other choreographers around the globe, seek fluid relationships with cultural and artistic structures that allow for new perspectives, greater accessibility, and global thinking.

Mancopy is in residency 4/14-4/22 at work|space Denver, offering performances and conducting outreach activities with local schools. The second international dance event curated by Control Group Productions, Mancopy’s tour offers Coloradoans a rare opportunity to engage with globally acclaimed artists working in the heart of global current events in the Middle East.

More information on Mancopy

Inquiries on the tour and performances: Patrick Mueller / 303-947-2827

(for other personnel needs, click here or scroll down)

We employ a unique and complex process that reaches out from foundations in contemporary dance/movement into a post-medium approach to Performance. The work demands comfort with both intensive collaboration and ambitious self-direction – receptivity, flexibility, rigor, hunger for the unknown.

We seek particular individuals with highly developed embodiment practices (including vocal work, ideally) and the ability work outside of familiar rubrics and vocabularies. For this project we’re particularly seeking performers with a bulk of experience with site work and performance installation.

AUDITION DETAILS: Please RSVP for one of the following (and please audition only if you are available for the project) at patrick@controlgroupproductions.org:

Wednesday 3/27, 10-3pm in Denver at *Between the Bones / 6th Avenue UCC (3250 E. 6th Ave).

NOTE TIME CHANGE! Friday 3/29, 10-3pm in Boulder at Naropa’s Nalanda campus, 63rd and Arapahoe.

The audition will include free company class, repertory phrase work, and individual assignments. No prepared materials necessary.

*Please RSVP to confirm location and time of the audition.

PROJECT DETAILS:
Rehearsals: May 1 – early August, 10 hours/week (M/W/F daytimes, scheduling flexible)
Performances: August/September, 5-8 scheduled shows, possible 1-3 week extension
Artist Fee: $750 minimum, higher depending on external funding
For questions and to RSVP, contact patrick@controlgroupproductions.org.

ADDITIONAL PERSONNEL NEEDS:
In addition to our ensemble needs, we are looking for the following two additional personnel:

Tour Guide: The Tour Guide will accompany the audience on the bus and provide a narrative and supplemental information about the sites, the city, and the work. Partially scripted, partially improvised, partially functional front-of-house, this role requires a strong theatre performer who can be both the front line and the through-line for the audience experience.

The commitment has some flexibility, with a minimum requirement of several weeks of rehearsals and 2-5 weeks of performances. Depending on interest, it can also include participation in the ensemble process and collaboration on scripting. The fee structure will be the same as other company members, scaled to the person’s responsibilities and time demands.
 

Production Manager / General Tech: This person will be responsible for assisting with planning, marketing, and execution of the event, with diverse duties including but not limited to: obtaining site permits, distributing advertising, corresponding with sponsors, documenting rehearsals, driving the cast transport during the event, operating basic lighting and sound equipment. Basically, Superman/woman. This could be several interns, and veteran performer, an event producer,… (or, of course, an actual production manager). Fee commensurate with experience and responsibilities / time demands.

Control Group Productions and the Biennial of the Americas present
The third in Control Group’s five-work series engaging
Romanticism in collision with the modern world

Salon Romantik, opus 3
FEAR AND PROPHETS

August 2013

The roots of Manifest Destiny.
The foundations of the Apocalypse.
Nature resurgent in a post-human landscape.

Fear and Prophets is a multi-site outdoor performance event viewed as a bus tour. In a journey from Denver’s urban core north through its industrial wastelands into the reclaimed wilds of the lower Platte valley, we explore a local world and culture out of balance, the histories that brought us here, and the dystopic futures sitting on the horizon. Fueled by the ethos and philosophies of 19th-century Romanticism, pop renderings of Apocalyptica, and the transformative potentials of Permaculture design, we draw a web of connections that tie us inexorably to our natural world.

GET INVOLVED.

DONATE TO THE PROJECT.

CONTACT.

OUR TEAM: We’re still building our team (see our Audition and Personnel Needs pages to get involved as an artist), but here’s how it’s forming up:

Control Group Productions is a platform for live arts research, development, distribution, and advocacy. Driven by the belief that art is integral to a healthy society, we take a whole-community approach, creating boldly innovative new works, presenting local and touring companies at our home venue, and comprehensively engaging the public with powerful, immersive aesthetic experiences, dialogs, and education.

Concept and Direction: Patrick Mueller / Control Group Productions

Performance: Patrick Mueller, Kristine Whittle, Hallie Bauernschmidt, +2

Tour Guide: (not yet selected)

Fashion Design by Buffalo Exchange Colorado and Tricia Hoke

Space Design: Artist/architects Sergio Preston and Rori Knudtson

Sound Design: Brian Freeland

Production: Control Group Productions and The Biennial of the Americas

A JOURNEY: The project loosely follows the waterways and rail lines that first connected Denver to the world beyond its borders. Cherry Creek, the Platte River, and the historic Denver Pacific Railway line (now part of the Union Pacific). These arteries, fed crucial resources to the city, underpinning the dynamic growth of the region. Running parallel out of Denver, they offer a potent image of modernity in process – technology and nature in competition, carrying the products and by-products of a community dependent on the outside.

Our project travels from Denver’s thriving urban core out through ravaged, often dehumanized industrial wastelands and into the rehabilitated nature north of the city, pursuing progress in reverse – or, more accurately, through the retrograde spectrum of a cycle. We look at how nature, held at bay or tightly controlled in the urban core, creeps back into spaces barely inhabitable, resurgent and entropic in its reclamation process. Engaging imagery from pop culture’s current fixation with Apocalyptica, we examine different futures, from catastrophic to utopian, where the power dynamic of human and nature shifts – an end to an infestation, or a return to balance and harmony.

SITES: We’re still exploring our local world for the hidden gems and potent signs of this shifting balance between nature and culture; but here are a couple of our prospective locations…

• Union Station: Denver’s heart of transit and commerce.
• The Delgany / Cherry Creek Railroad bridge: A vestige of Denver’s tram rails; an intersection of Denver’s roots in rail and water.
• Beatrice and Woodsley: a restaurant designed as the forested setting of a local fairytale.
• Ironton & Weilworks Galleries: a frontier settlement built to be self-sustaining and defensible.
• Northside Park and the Packing District Cattle Bridge ruins: aestheticized remnants of a past culture. A space allocated for devastating waste (waste water treatment, animal containment and slaughter); nature, partly cultivated and partly wild, re-emerging through the human imprint.
• Sand Creek / Vasquez Blvd Overpass: Beneath this bridge is a stunning mausoleum to human presence: an ode to the rampant sprawl of concrete and also to a resurgent natural beauty that defies its critical illness/pollution.
• Suncor Gas Refinery and Conagra Graineries: The source of our food and power, separated from humanity, buried in hidden corners over the horizon, distanced from sight and mind…
• Rocky Mtn. Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge: former chemical weapons manufacturing and storage facility, still faces serious difficulties from toxic chemicals that leached into the ground and water in the mid- to late-20th century; but a success story for military and other government clean-up efforts: a thriving ecology returning to its natural state. We are in discussions with Refuge officials about the use of the amphitheater and possibly a second site in the public areas of the Refuge.
• The Platte River: As we get further downstream from the industrial activities of North Denver and Commerce City, we see a river slowly cleaning itself – burying the hazardous wastes and returning to a more and more balanced natural state: the completion of the cycle of nature through human imprint back to a natural state – shifted, in some ways irrevocably damaged, but still viable after human imprint fades or comes into balance.

CGP Company Class
Wednesdays 10:30am-12pm

weekly March 6 – May 29, 2013

at Between the Bones (6th Avenue UCC, 3250 E. 6th Ave, Denver)
led by Patrick Mueller (CGP Artistic Director)

$12/class or 5 for $50 (no pre-registration needed, drop-ins welcome)
Contact: patrick@controlgroupproductions.org
303-947-2827

These classes approach dance technique functionally, focusing on cleaning fundamental coordinations and attaining movement facility and ease through exercises that balance control and propulsion with release and momentum. Anatomical information about hard and soft structures inform the practice. The class builds from a gentle, introspective warm-up to challenging phrasework demanding fierce athleticism and refined artistry.

Bio: Patrick Mueller is the Artistic Director of Control Group Productions and Co-Director of work|space Denver. Previous to founding these organizations, he performed with dance companies in Germany, Denmark, New York, San Fransisco, and Denver, working primarily collaboratively on original pieces that toured to a dozen countries on three continents. His teaching approach amalgamates experiences from many different movement and somatic practices, including Bartenieff Fundamentals, Alexander Technique, releasing techniques, traditional modern dance, yoga, kung fu, and parkour.

Control Group Productions and Friends present

Salon Romantik, opus 2: of bounded solitudes in tangled constellation strung across the bright abyss

January 25 & 26, February 1 & 2
at work|space Denver
2701 Lawrence St., Denver 80205
Admission on-going 7:30-9pm

Tickets $20 / $17 online
Includes performances, installations, party games, tea, and handmade chocolates.

A Romantic salon.
A gallery performance party.
An entirely unique aesthetic experience.

Solitary points in the infinite abyss. Parts and whole. The filamental, imagined lines between and through. An energetic matrix: object, atmosphere, and correlation. Recklessly, blissfully we cast our sublime solitudes into the irrepressible, ecstatic chaos of this web of things.

A performance/installation/experimentally-structured two-week event featuring independent, collaborative, and intersected works by a dozen extraordinary artists. A reimagining of modes of production and presentation.

This second of five Control Group-led explorations of Romanticism – its history and ideologies, its echoes into other historical contexts, including the present – extends our research on to a new, broader platform: a true artist salon. Pursuing independent work toward a unified vision, we create a unique, multivalent, organically-structured, aesthetically rich experience where we invite our guests to enter into our world and become part of the event.

Featuring:
Performance by Patrick Mueller, Rori Knudtson, Kristine Whittle, Hallie Bauernschmidt, Katie Anhalt, and Erica Augden
Fashion by Tricia Hoke
Space Design by Becky Heavner, Andrew Benson, Sergio Preston, Rori Knudtson, and Patrick Mueller
Sound by Brian Freeland, Marcella Delapaz, and others
Chocolate and Tea by Serina Hamilton
Performative Bartending by Joern Langshorst
and much more…
 

Contact info: Patrick@controlgroupproductions.org
www.controlgroupproductions.org

CGP COMPANY BIO:
Control Group Productions is a dance company / research platform into live performance. We create intermedia performance and dance theatre: immersive, transportive, finely crafted experiences of you and me and here and other worlds. Through site and public space work, architectural inverventions, and audience-interactivity, we seek to reconsider structures of making and sharing art. We aim to build a sustainable arts future through administering and actively curating a small venue.

Founded in 2008 by Patrick Mueller, CGP creates one to three major works each year, ranging from stage events to installation to film. Additionally, we regularly create mobile site and public space works. Our work has been presented by the Denver Theatre District, Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, BINDERY|space, Boulder Fringe, ARTOPIA by Westword, and others, with most premieres at our home venue work|space Denver. Our most recent work, Salon Romantik, opus 1: Wanderers in the Sea of Fog, toured to North Carolina in 2012 for performance as part of the American Dance Festival MFA Performance series. The first of five pieces dealing with Romanticism, fairytale, 1960’s avant garde philosophy, and contemporary pop culture, Salon 1 engages narratives of crossroads and faery worlds through continually mutating characters from Hansel and Gretel to Vaslav Nijinsky to lost dogs to the Devil.