“…but what would you say you do here?” A Reintroduction…

This summer a team of doctors replaced the center of me. Opened my belly, reached into my dantien, took out a broken part, and replaced it with some new high-tech hardware – a literal de-centering and re-centering. 

It’s left me reflecting on broader shifts in what I’ve been up to at Control Group in recent years. Maybe a reintroduction is in order?

17 years ago I called a meeting with three close friends and asked if they would help me form Control Group Productions. It was the midst of the 2008 financial crisis – Lehman’s had just crashed, stock markets were in free fall, the entire system was shaking. It felt like the perfect time to attempt a different way of working – experimental, anti-institutional, embracing ambiguity and dynamic uncertainty (more on utopia as action vs. destination in Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed). 

The practice that emerged has focused on the edges of control – entering the porous borderlands of human influence and agency, navigating interstitial terrains of experience, cultivating fruitful encounters with the overwhelming forces beyond the safety of well-charted territories. (And occasionally grounding sensory-driven experiential artistic creations in abstruse intellectualized and metaphoricalized esoteria.) Underpinning that practice is a set of values around how we center artists and their projects, how we meet and feed our audiences, and how we serve our broader community. 

In late 2008 we blithely thought that the imminent collapse of bloated institutions would open a straight path to artistic vibrancy and financial stability, and… a lot of success, on a far different route than envisioned. Over 17 years, Control Group lived in transition, rarely rooting deeply in a single place or way of working, instead rooting more and more deeply into the practice, the partnerships and collaborations that feed it, and the sprawling community of artists, audiences, and others whom we serve with experiences consistently described as indescribable and entirely unique.

Expeditions

We take expeditions into the unknown. As artists exploring and developing each new work, and then as guides, shoulder to shoulder with our audiences through unfamiliar terrains. I’ve written and spoken about Expeditionary Performance before; the thing I want to reiterate here is: this isn’t just a fun, adventurous way of making art, it’s purposeful and strategic with our goal of transforming people through art.

Transformation begins with displacement, untethering ourselves from fixed positions. It grows through active investment, participating in the journey and the story, connecting with fellow travelers. It gains potency and durability when we tether the unknown to known locales, letting the experience grow roots that continue beyond the end of the show.

Our expeditionary practice also cultivates our ability to serve other artists’ projects. We aren’t fixed in our ways, and that allows us to follow each project’s unique vision and goals responsively, without imprinting our own practices and voices on it. Tuned into the many available pathways through a production, we’re able to listen and respond to each project’s beating heart and emergent needs.

And this gets to maybe the most important part of any expedition: who you’re traveling with. Each journey introduces unique needs, challenges, and opportunities. It offers different rewards of investment in the expedition with an embodied experience of relational awareness – rooted in an individual sense of agency to contribute to and participate in the co-creation of a story that is much larger than one individual or group – the journey we undertake situates us into a deeper sense of belonging to each other and this world....

Among our evolving communities of audience/participants and collaborating artists, many have joined for myriad adventures, many others have found us for the expedition just right for them. The expeditions ask a lot of everyone involved – and there is a treasure trove awaiting those who are willing to show up with their whole self vs a passive recipient/consumer of the thing. 

Art can be defined in so many ways: entertainment, beauty, ugliness, inspiration, etc. Our interest lies in the alchemy that is possible within the weaving in, through, around the space between the lives and beings that spiral around the weird little constellation that is CGP....

We hope that you’ll expedition with us in the coming months.