Off-Center was founded in 2010 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts as a small, experimental "theatrical test kitchen" by Charlie Miller and Emily Tarquin. The goal was to engage younger, more adventurous audiences with unexpected experiences that put them at the heart of the story.
"We realized that we couldn't just dress up traditional theater and expect a new audience to show up," says Miller, who is now Off-Center's executive director and curator; he's also been a member of the DCPA's executive leadership team since 2022. "We must create fundamentally different content to reach a different audience; that hypothesis has proven correct. In 2011, we got a grant through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation that allowed us to develop our programming vision. We articulated it with a recipe, with five ingredients that guide Off-Center's work: immersive, convergent, connective, inventive and now, which were baked into our DNA from the start and remain incredibly relevant."
Since its inception, Off-Center has produced 67 productions with a total of 15,040 performances attended by nearly 593,000 people, helping establish Denver as a national hub for immersive art. But now, Off-Center is shifting its strategy, reducing original productions in favor of a national touring model.
"Our strategy and model going forward is going to be to produce our own work every other year or thereabouts and, in between, to bring in the coolest stuff we can find from around the world," says Miller. The high costs associated with immersive work prompted the decision to shift resources away from producing in-house work every year.
Miller believes that the most effective way to make immersive experiences both engaging and profitable is to create a touring network that will take installations to new markets all over the world, similar to how Broadway producers have made their shows successful by appearing in venues such as the Buell Theatre to recoup initial production costs.
And what will those immersive shows look like? "Immersive needs to be multi-sensory — it can't just be something that you watch," Miller says. "It must engage more than one, and ideally all five, of your senses. Not all immersive has to have a narrative, but Off-Center is focused on theatrical storytelling."
Courtney Ozaki, founder and creative producer of the Japanese Arts Network (JA-NE) and creative producer at Off-Center, adds that "immersive is about having an embodied experience. It's a very divisive question: What is immersive? Some people are sensitive about the word, but I'm not as precious about what people call immersive. It's less about the word and more about the kind of experience that the audience is put at the center of, and because it's embodied, immersive allows audiences to have deeper empathy for the story or narrative being told."
The Mile High City has proven to be a welcoming environment for creating immersive theater.
"Denver has always kind of had its finger on the pulse of arts, and it's very entrepreneurial — we're very much a startup state," Ozaki says. "The more I look back on growing up in Denver, the more I realize how many opportunities we had to have live experiences. Between the Hall of Life at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Casa Bonita and the North Pole event in Colorado Springs, we were surrounded by immersive places, and the arts are central to downtown. ... It’s a combination of the people here, the funding environment being right, an entrepreneurial spirit and locals having grown up with experiential elements in their life, whether they know it or not."
Off-Center has been a significant driver of ticket sales for the DCPA, with immersive attendees now accounting for 23 to 40 percent of the nonprofit organization's new buyers. Off-Center's average audience member is younger than at the DCPA's other offerings, with an average age of 46 versus 50 for Broadway shows and 53 for traditional Theatre Company productions.
Despite Off-Center's success, producing immersive theater comes with distinct challenges. Large-scale productions like Theater of the Mind, which Off-Center co-created with David Byrne for $4 million in 2022, necessitate complex sets, a lengthy production timeline and extensive coordination. Although the show drew over 42,000 people across 2,743 performances, the DCPA's associate director of communications, Brittany Gutierrez, confirms that Theater of the Mind was produced under a nonprofit business model, and ticket sales alone did not cover the total production cost.
"Off-Center is the equivalent, just in terms of square footage, of three or four main-stage shows for the Theatre Company," Miller says. "As much as I would love for us to do one every year, it's just not feasible given our human and financial resources. But there's a lot of demand for this work in Denver, and we want to be more than a once-every-other-year opportunity for people to do cool things."
Loyal Off-Center attendees may have already noticed the shift in programming away from original work to out-of-town shows this year: Space Explorers: The Infinite from February 2 through May 5, Darkfield from July 11 through September 1, and the upcoming Monopoly Lifesized: Travel Edition, all being brought from around the world to Denver for local audiences. And after four years in Colorado, Off-Center will be touring one of its original productions, Lonnie Hanzon's Camp Christmas, to another city for the first time as part of its efforts to recoup costs of expensive productions.
"It hasn't been [publicly] announced where yet, but Camp Christmas will be going to another city this year," Miller teases. "We're hoping that all the work we create going forward will be built to travel, and Camp Christmas is our first foray into that. We are talking to potential partners who would take our shows after Denver so that the work we do can have an impact on other communities and continue to help build this national ecosystem of immersive art and entertainment."
Miller and his team are also taking a leading role in building a network of immersive artists and producers across the country. In November 2023, Off-Center hosted the first-ever Immersive Immersive conference, which brought together over forty arts organizations from across the U.S. to discuss how to foster a touring ecosystem for immersive work.
"We want to help create a sustainable ecosystem for immersive theater that allows projects to travel between cities," says Miller. "It’s much more complicated than a traditional Broadway tour, but we’re building this network where immersive work can move from city to city and continue to thrive."
Another key part of Off-Center’s future is finding a permanent home in Denver. In the meantime, Monopoly Lifesized will open in a temporary space on South Broadway.
"In our dream world, we’ll have a space that becomes a kind of giant, flexible black box," Miller shares. "As much as we've enjoyed being all over the city in different places, it is very difficult and expensive to stand up a new building for one project and then vacate and start over again. We've had to do that by necessity as we're proving this model, but now that we've proven it, there's buy-in from the board and from leadership to get a dedicated home. We’ll be at 407 South Broadway for the next two years; after that, we’re actively looking for what the next place is and trying to figure out how long we can be there, if not forever."
The long-term vision for Off-Center is to continue offering a variety of immersive experiences that challenge and engage audiences while fostering a national network of immersive artists. With a strategic shift toward sustainability, a commitment to touring and a plan for a permanent home, Off-Center hopes to serve as a model for how the theater industry can produce immersive work across the country.
"There's been a lot of press about the struggles of arts nonprofits post-COVID, and how institutions are having to rethink their business model," Miller says. "We believe that diversifying your programming allows you to engage with the same people in new ways while also engaging new people along the way. We really feel like not only is immersive a cool and exciting art form, but it's also a vital part of the mix of programming that arts organizations need to pursue for the future."
"We realized that we couldn't just dress up traditional theater and expect a new audience to show up," says Miller, who is now Off-Center's executive director and curator; he's also been a member of the DCPA's executive leadership team since 2022. "We must create fundamentally different content to reach a different audience; that hypothesis has proven correct. In 2011, we got a grant through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation that allowed us to develop our programming vision. We articulated it with a recipe, with five ingredients that guide Off-Center's work: immersive, convergent, connective, inventive and now, which were baked into our DNA from the start and remain incredibly relevant."
Since its inception, Off-Center has produced 67 productions with a total of 15,040 performances attended by nearly 593,000 people, helping establish Denver as a national hub for immersive art. But now, Off-Center is shifting its strategy, reducing original productions in favor of a national touring model.
"Our strategy and model going forward is going to be to produce our own work every other year or thereabouts and, in between, to bring in the coolest stuff we can find from around the world," says Miller. The high costs associated with immersive work prompted the decision to shift resources away from producing in-house work every year.
Miller believes that the most effective way to make immersive experiences both engaging and profitable is to create a touring network that will take installations to new markets all over the world, similar to how Broadway producers have made their shows successful by appearing in venues such as the Buell Theatre to recoup initial production costs.
And what will those immersive shows look like? "Immersive needs to be multi-sensory — it can't just be something that you watch," Miller says. "It must engage more than one, and ideally all five, of your senses. Not all immersive has to have a narrative, but Off-Center is focused on theatrical storytelling."
Courtney Ozaki, founder and creative producer of the Japanese Arts Network (JA-NE) and creative producer at Off-Center, adds that "immersive is about having an embodied experience. It's a very divisive question: What is immersive? Some people are sensitive about the word, but I'm not as precious about what people call immersive. It's less about the word and more about the kind of experience that the audience is put at the center of, and because it's embodied, immersive allows audiences to have deeper empathy for the story or narrative being told."
The Mile High City has proven to be a welcoming environment for creating immersive theater.
"Denver has always kind of had its finger on the pulse of arts, and it's very entrepreneurial — we're very much a startup state," Ozaki says. "The more I look back on growing up in Denver, the more I realize how many opportunities we had to have live experiences. Between the Hall of Life at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Casa Bonita and the North Pole event in Colorado Springs, we were surrounded by immersive places, and the arts are central to downtown. ... It’s a combination of the people here, the funding environment being right, an entrepreneurial spirit and locals having grown up with experiential elements in their life, whether they know it or not."
Charlie Miller is Off-Center's executive director and has been a member of the DCPA's executive leadership team since 2022.
Denver Center for the Performing Arts
Despite Off-Center's success, producing immersive theater comes with distinct challenges. Large-scale productions like Theater of the Mind, which Off-Center co-created with David Byrne for $4 million in 2022, necessitate complex sets, a lengthy production timeline and extensive coordination. Although the show drew over 42,000 people across 2,743 performances, the DCPA's associate director of communications, Brittany Gutierrez, confirms that Theater of the Mind was produced under a nonprofit business model, and ticket sales alone did not cover the total production cost.
"Off-Center is the equivalent, just in terms of square footage, of three or four main-stage shows for the Theatre Company," Miller says. "As much as I would love for us to do one every year, it's just not feasible given our human and financial resources. But there's a lot of demand for this work in Denver, and we want to be more than a once-every-other-year opportunity for people to do cool things."
Loyal Off-Center attendees may have already noticed the shift in programming away from original work to out-of-town shows this year: Space Explorers: The Infinite from February 2 through May 5, Darkfield from July 11 through September 1, and the upcoming Monopoly Lifesized: Travel Edition, all being brought from around the world to Denver for local audiences. And after four years in Colorado, Off-Center will be touring one of its original productions, Lonnie Hanzon's Camp Christmas, to another city for the first time as part of its efforts to recoup costs of expensive productions.
"It hasn't been [publicly] announced where yet, but Camp Christmas will be going to another city this year," Miller teases. "We're hoping that all the work we create going forward will be built to travel, and Camp Christmas is our first foray into that. We are talking to potential partners who would take our shows after Denver so that the work we do can have an impact on other communities and continue to help build this national ecosystem of immersive art and entertainment."
Miller and his team are also taking a leading role in building a network of immersive artists and producers across the country. In November 2023, Off-Center hosted the first-ever Immersive Immersive conference, which brought together over forty arts organizations from across the U.S. to discuss how to foster a touring ecosystem for immersive work.
"We want to help create a sustainable ecosystem for immersive theater that allows projects to travel between cities," says Miller. "It’s much more complicated than a traditional Broadway tour, but we’re building this network where immersive work can move from city to city and continue to thrive."
Another key part of Off-Center’s future is finding a permanent home in Denver. In the meantime, Monopoly Lifesized will open in a temporary space on South Broadway.
"In our dream world, we’ll have a space that becomes a kind of giant, flexible black box," Miller shares. "As much as we've enjoyed being all over the city in different places, it is very difficult and expensive to stand up a new building for one project and then vacate and start over again. We've had to do that by necessity as we're proving this model, but now that we've proven it, there's buy-in from the board and from leadership to get a dedicated home. We’ll be at 407 South Broadway for the next two years; after that, we’re actively looking for what the next place is and trying to figure out how long we can be there, if not forever."
The long-term vision for Off-Center is to continue offering a variety of immersive experiences that challenge and engage audiences while fostering a national network of immersive artists. With a strategic shift toward sustainability, a commitment to touring and a plan for a permanent home, Off-Center hopes to serve as a model for how the theater industry can produce immersive work across the country.
"There's been a lot of press about the struggles of arts nonprofits post-COVID, and how institutions are having to rethink their business model," Miller says. "We believe that diversifying your programming allows you to engage with the same people in new ways while also engaging new people along the way. We really feel like not only is immersive a cool and exciting art form, but it's also a vital part of the mix of programming that arts organizations need to pursue for the future."
Monopoly Lifesized: Travel Edition opens October 22 and runs through January 5 at Off-Center, 407 South Broadway. Learn more at denvercenter.org.
