Fear and Prophets

FEAR AND PROPHETS: Salon Romantik, Opus 3

August 2013

Join Control Group Productions and the Biennial of the Americas on an epic journey from Denver’s urban core to its resurgent wildernesses, tracking human imprint on our natural environment. Histories, futures, and fictions collide as we travel by bus through built and natural environs from historical downtown through industrial wastelands to the revitalized natural beauty of Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge. An entirely unique experience of our city, FEAR & PROPHETS reaches into the past to see the future, slamming together Manifest Destiny, the modern Romantic ethos, and pop-culture renderings of the Apocalypse to prophecy our downfall and our prospects for salvation.

This multi-site-specific avant garde performance fuses dance, theatre, poetry, design, and live-interactive sound technologies into a journey through the cracks in our known world and into the wilderness beneath.

Deteriorating urban fabrics and human imprint on the environment.

The end of Manifest Destiny and the myth of endless progress.

Visions of the Apocalypse and Nature resurgent.

The Romanticism of the End Times.

Fear and Prophets is a multi-site outdoor performance event viewed as a bus tour. In a journey from Denver’s urban core north through its industrial wastelands into the reclaimed wilds of the lower Platte valley, we explore a local world and culture out of balance, the histories that brought us here, and the dystopic futures sitting on the horizon. Fueled by the ethos and philosophies of 19th-century Romanticism, pop renderings of Apocalyptica, and the transformative potentials of Permaculture design, we draw a web of connections that tie us inexorably to our natural world.

A JOURNEY: The project follows the waterways and rail lines that first connected Denver to the world beyond its borders. Cherry Creek, the Platte River, and the historic Denver Pacific Railway line (now part of the Union Pacific). These arteries, fed crucial resources to the city, underpinning the dynamic growth of the region. Running parallel out of Denver, they offer a potent image of modernity in process - technology and nature in competition, carrying the products and by-products of a community dependent on the outside.

Our project travels from Denver's thriving urban core out through ravaged, often dehumanized industrial wastelands to Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge - the revitalized nature reserve north of the city. This path pursues progress in reverse - or, more accurately, through the retrograde spectrum of a cycle. We look at how nature, held at bay or tightly controlled in the urban core, creeps back into spaces barely inhabitable, resurgent and entropic in its reclamation process. Engaging imagery from pop culture's current fixation with Apocalyptica, we examine different futures, from catastrophic to utopian, where the power dynamic of human and nature shifts - an end to an infestation, or a return to balance and harmony.

SITES: We'll explore our local world through both sites and the routes between them, embedding our performance into the history and social fabric of the locations we journey through.

• Downtown Denver and Cherry Creek: Denver's urban core and beating heart.

• River North Arts District: Denver's current frontier - an arts settlement in the city's dilapidated warehouse district.

• Northside Park: Denver's recovered waste water treatment plant. An aestheticized remnant of the industrial age, a semi- re-emerging from its devastating human imprint.

• Sand Creek / Vasquez Blvd Overpass: Beneath this bridge is a stunning mausoleum to human presence: an ode to the rampant sprawl of concrete and also to a resurgent natural beauty that defies its critical illness/pollution.

• Rocky Mtn. Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge: a former chemical weapons manufacturing and storage facility, rehabilitated into a verdant reserve for natural ecology and animal life.