THE END

This immersive hijacking of a traditional civic bus tour takes audiences on a ride through a city transformed by escalating climate catastrophe, inexorably rolling toward the brink of collapse. THE END explores Denver’s present and futures, and seeks refuge from the rising storm, in an interactive expedition spanning multiple sites in a custom renovated apocalyptic school bus.

Equal parts sublime artistry, civics lesson, summer camp, and sheer wild ride, THE END offers an entirely unique cultural adventure that will change how you see Denver forever – or until the end, anyway…

Project background

In 2020, we set out to create a bus tour of the apocalypse. We wanted to magnify the alarms sounding around the climate crisis, and channel the real, dire fear we felt around our indifferent national politics and dysfunctional global dialogs. And then… well, we learned plenty about apocalypse, in microcosm at least, through the last two years of pandemic, extreme climate events, and growing onslaught of doomsday news. Things that previously needed a bit of imagination started to come into plain view. 

And yet here we are, again, still, with all of that learning still not catalyzing the necessary responses, still not galvanized to the work ahead.

THE END (2022) drops the fixation on cyberpunk apocalyptica in favor of a more sober, if no less apocalyptic, assessment of our local culture and ecology, and where we are headed in coming years. Instead of helping us understand what the apocalypse feels like (the last two years have helped with that), we are setting out to understand what it feels like to move through it, to see beyond The End.

Along a 16-mile bus tour of Denver area water and green spaces, we’ll look the future in the face, metabolize the fear and trauma of our first doses of worse things coming, explore viable actions to prepare for what’s coming and prevent worst-case scenarios, and sow hope where we can.

If you are interested in learning about specific accessibility information and trigger warnings in THE END, please click here.

THE END is made possible through support from the SCFD of Denver, Adams, Arapahoe, Broomfield, and Jefferson Counties; the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Denver Foundation’s Arts Affinity Group; the Denver Music Advancement Fund of Denver Arts & Venues; Colorado Creative Industries; and many generous individuals.

THE END is part of Control Group’s ongoing works series Treeline, exploring shifting human relationships with wilderness, land, and Nature in the Anthropocene. Click here for more about the Treeline series, including our current reading list.