By It’s rare to leave a dance theatre piece with the grit of it still on your lips and crackling between your teeth. It’s even more rare to be haunted by words, images, and movements for a week afterward.
Driving away from Control Group Productions’ “Aggregate Immateriality” in dead silence, the glittering lights of Suncor took on an even more ominous sci-fi light after the immersive production’s reflection on death, the afterlife, and this, our precious and only land. The stacks of the oil refinery served as a reminder of the industry that once was.
The abandoned slaughterhouse, where the production takes place, sits placidly on the deathbed of the meatpacking industry long since pushed aside by isolated feedlots, mass factory farming, and the decline of ranching. The intersection of I-25 and I-70, an industrial crossroads, could not have been a better inbetween for the reflections of “Aggregate Immateriality.” In legends, the crossroads is where you meet the devil to sell your soul for money or fame. It’s also a poetic no man’s land, a wrinkle between this world and the next.
“Aggregate Immateriality” is an experiential, interactive combination of theatre, dance, design, and site. Control Group Productions’ description notes that they “… invite audiences to contemplate their mortality as [they] follow a friend through her transition from life into death. In a space made for animal mass murder, [they] offer gentle gifts and warm human contact, working to dispel our fear of the specter of death, and invigorate the exquisite sensation of being alive.”
Far from being warm and fuzzy, the piece didn’t shy away from the edge of contamination, the diseased land, and the violence inherent in the location. Driving into the abandoned building’s dirt lot I felt a healthy dose of dread, but once I entered the makeshift bar I could tell that the piece was concerned with something warm and human at its core. Each performer was a fully formed character, although a vague emissary from the beyond. Despite the creepy vibe of the space, I found myself accepting what I was urged to accept: light and shadow are everywhere. We must escape the duality between light and dark as concepts that confine life and death, bliss and fear, community and loneliness, in order to truly live. These dances are meant to be viewed in the dark.
Literalism
The production was less otherworldly than unearthly, which I know sounds like a dumb distinction but it’s the best I can do to describe the sense of place Control Group Productions, lead by Patrick Mueller, created in the abandoned slaughterhouse on Washington Street. It was ghostly, but not haunted. The air was stony and wet, like the catacombs. The sound and space design, by Incite Colorado, enveloped each dank, subterranean room of the slaughterhouse where meathooks still dangled from the ceiling and the floor was bone-dry silt. The piece inhabited the place but wasn’t enslaved to it by literalism.
At peril of saying too much, I’ll give you some brief impressions of the piece. A piece like this is a series of impressions, highly interpretable, and deciphered almost subconsciously. As far as I can tell the audience is broken into small groups and moves from station to station throughout the building. Each group experiences the distinct short pieces of dance or monologue in a unique order. Despite the way the piece energetically clicked along, it never felt rushed. I observed several organic moments between performers and audience members. I dug in the dirt. I danced with an old man. I peered down an elevator shaft. I ate some beets. I lost my senses and gained others.
I was lucky in that one of the first stations I experienced was part personal conversation and part guided meditation. The whole piece like the epigraph after the title page that suggests the book’s theme. Actor and dancer, Allison Blakeney, spoke conversationally to our little group and capriciously, but reverently, suggested a few themes, thoughts, or moods to consider during the piece. She lit a candle and placed in our palms thoughts of purgatory, Styx, The Bardo — ideas we could hold gently in our meatpacker apron pockets or in the front of our minds as we traversed the labyrinth of projected images shot and edited beautifully by Churn Creative.
The message was elusive but nonetheless clear. Or rather, the component parts were crystalline but the whole was interpretable. The title “Aggregate Immateriality” is apt in capturing how this kind of work is a sum of abstractions served to an audience without apology or didacticism. In the hands of less thoughtful, careful, and concise technicians it could have been too oblique but Control Group Productions found a beautiful balance. Truthfully I can’t say I got it, but it got me.
The precipice
What set this piece apart from others I have seen was the ingenious and careful use of sensory deprivation and the dynamism therein. Blindfolded and wheeled about, a voice drew me to edge right up to the precipice of total darkness, poke a toe over the edge and, instead of yanking back in fear, gracefully tilt into the void in an ethereal swan dive. It is true that depriving one sense can elevate another. This piece wrung me out so I could better absorb.
An embrace of oblivion or a handhold in the great unknown, artists love setting work in this overwhelming space. Hieronymus Bosch, George Saunders, countless immersive pieces like “The Infernal Motel” created by Epic Immersive in San Francisco or “Bitter at the End” by E3W Productions in LA have explored this unfathomable topic. The void is a wonderful place to ask perennial questions about meaning and purpose. One maxim that arose multiple times was: “If there is so much death in life, there must be a little life in death.” “Aggregate Immateriality” manages to ask common questions without being mundane, to heighten language with movement without appearing overwrought, and to shake up the performance scene in Denver with truly innovative site-specific work.
