Mission

Control Group Productions creates expeditionary performance. We use artistic research and development to cultivate new connections between people, place, and practice, offering audiences transformative embodied experiences. We elevate vital voices in our performing arts community by gathering and sharing resources that nurture artists’ work and careers.

Vision

We are thought leaders and flagship innovators in immersive/experiential theatre, site-specific performance, and socially-engaged practice. Our work:

  • transforms the lives of the people who experience it, connecting deeply with local communities of highest need and magnetizing audiences and artistic collaborators from around the world;

  • transforms locations and communities around the world, sharing our practices and experiences and involving our home community in elevated cultural dialogs;

  • transforms the lives of our staff, collaborators, and partners through robust compensation, high collaborative agency, and exceptional opportunities;

  • transforms our community through modeling, teaching, and dialog that elevates standards of equity, transparency, and community service.

Equity

Control Group is committed to cultivating a community and working environment built on foundations of equity, inclusion, and anti-oppression. We are committed to hearing, incorporating, and magnifying diverse voices, perspectives, and experiences, and to pursuing and promoting greater justice in our communities. We are committed to working from a platform of compassion, respect, and trust in these efforts and in everything we do.

We approach this work as ongoing and urgent, and are pursuing it holistically and comprehensively across all facets of our organization’s structure, administration, and activities. We have defined a path of progress that starts with creating equitable platforms and policies that engender access and inclusion, then takes proactive steps toward greater diversity of voices and leadership that mobilizes us to work together in promoting greater equity. We reflect our values of social and climate justice in our work and our conduct, seeking to build awareness and instigate concrete change. 

Values and Practice

Journeys Together.

Above all, every project is a group of people working shoulder to shoulder. We work to assemble resilient constellations of hardy adventurers with diverse abilities and experiences, committed to collaborative navigation as we work together to meet the emergent needs of the project as it comes to life. We put our people first, imbuing each role with creative agency and meeting each person’s commitment with reciprocal care-taking.

Research Trajectories.

We use multi-faceted research and experiential inquiry to explore the liminal verges of human agency and experience – the interface of individual, community, ecology, and context; the resultant collisions, conundrums, and inflection points of thought and action. To reach with purpose into these malleable unknowns, we formulate frameworks based on direction and trajectory instead of set goals and end-points. This allows the project to develop organically through deep exploration.

Stewardship & Reciprocity.

We are travelers through this world. We work to meet each new idea, experience, location, perspective responsibly – taking interest without staking claim, intertwining curiosity and generosity. Depending on the situation, this may entail principles of Leave No Trace, fair exchange / mutual benefit, or global stewardship.

Transformative Experiences.

We seek to activate audiences through experiences that resist categorization and shift/heighten perceptual awareness. This allows them to experience the thing itself, and choose and own how they experience it. Through this process, their worldview expands to accommodate that experience. This approach uses displacement – through physical, conceptual, and perceptual space – to stimulate growth for individuals and group.

Action advocacy.

We craft our expeditions to spark further journeys for our audience/participants – onward, inward, and into concrete action. We position our work to deepen dialogs, empathy, and understanding as a platform for instigating / supporting / augmenting positive change.

Shared learnings & resources.

There are many different journeys. For our own expeditions to thrive, we rely on a community of fellow adventurers, and a broader community of people who in turn rely on the learnings that our expeditions can offer them. From the start, we’ve taken a whole community approach to our programming – because we have things to share, because we value many voices, because thriving is contagious, and because we’re stronger together, and because the fact that we can implies the responsibility to do so.