LOCAL
August 11, 2022
LIFE
PHOTO BY ANDREW FRAIELI
10 Fort Lupton Press
Immersive art has found its place in Denver, bringing audiences through the screen and onto the stage BY ANDREW FRAIELI AFRAIELI@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
B
eethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” is immersive, drawing the listener into a carefully crafted soundscape of strung-out emotions and mountains crashing. Salvador Dali’s “Melting Clocks” is immersive, transporting the viewer to a surreal world of heat and time amuck. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is immersive, throwing the reader into an age of bootlegging, jazz and prosperity before the Great Depression. Any great work of art is immersive — what differentiates these classics from today’s definition of immersive art is a matter of purpose and choice. An audience chooses how they interact with the art, the art giving them the agency to act on that and what that art, this medium, can impress onto the audience because of it. “We wanted to give [the audience]
agency, but also to create a contextualized experience so they aren’t just sitting in the dark half of a theater, but are part of the event, because they are moving their eyeballs and ear canals in the world,” said Patrick Mueller, Denver-native, and artistic director at Control Group Productions, a production company based out of Lakewood. The company’s most recent project, “The End,” came to a close in Denver last month after bringing its audiences far from a darkened theater, forcing them to smell the refineries in Commerce City and walk around fallen bricks in an abandoned hideout, all on a Mad Maxesque bus touting other survivors in a post-apocalyptic climate change warning story. The goal, according to Mueller, was to give “an experience of what it feels like at the precipice of a de-civilizing moment, something
falling apart in a serious way.” But to impress that weight on the audience, he said the immersion was “crucial.” Audience becomes involved “It feels like people are looking at it in the face at this point, but they still aren’t figuring out how to change behavior,” he said. Really, he elaborated, the show allows people to be involved, to see themselves inside this crisis in a way that screen or theater cannot do, a way that forces people to look it in the face and “not having it be this virtuosity that is celebrated by distancing and elevating it onto the stage.” But Mueller sees the style doing even more than that single project’s goal: “We can offer what people are most hungry for, if they actually think about it — a rich experience that they’re part of, a social interaction for people that may spend their
whole day working from home — being out in the world and experiencing it really differently.” And for Zach Martens, co-founder of OddKnock, that is practically the goal of the production company’s work. “Coming through the pandemic, everyone has been isolated and gotten very used to it, and gotten used to spending a lot of time in front of Netflix,” he said. “People are being trained to sit still and isolated, and those are the two things that I think will destroy humanity the fastest.” OddKnock’s latest project (which also closed in Denver last month) was “From on High,” an absurd satire that brought the audience into an ‘80s office full of co-workers with an almost religious fervor for profits, and an obsessive work ethic. Slowly, as the work “week” goes on, SEE ART, P11
