THE END
June 9 - July 31, 2022
Denver, CO
THE END is available for touring through 2024.
A bespoke immersive show, THE END gives audience members a chance to feel what it is for the world to be falling apart around them, changing hearts and minds in the process.
It will be presented by La Jolla Playhouse at the renowned Without Walls Festival April 27-30th, 2023.
Scroll below to learn about our 2022 version and click here to learn more about touring opportunities.
THE END
A Bus Tour of Denver’s Climate Future
June 9 – July 31, 2022
Here we are. We are here.
But not for long.
Change is accelerating...
THE END is coming.
All Photography by Katie Day Weisberger
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 your city 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.
THE END brings together climate science, Denver history, Mountain West hydrology, dystopian science fiction, social engagement with local communities, and the palpable tension of the present societal moment into an entirely unique immersive performance experience. With unprecedented creative breadth and logistical intricacy, THE END builds on Control Group’s growing expertise in “expeditionary performance” – immersive, audience-mobile events that take guests on actual journeys through their world.
Along a 16-mile bus tour of Denver area water and green spaces, we looked the future in the face, metabolized the fear and trauma of our first doses of worse things coming, explored viable actions to prepare for what’s coming, and sowed 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 was 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