Miller ’04 Brings Immersive Vision to Denver

When the large-scale experiential drama Sweet & Lucky sold out 48 consecutive performances inside a sprawling warehouse near Denver’s River North Art District in 2016—inviting 72 audience members at a time into a mysterious antique store and plunging them into an interactive labyrinth of dreamlike encounters with actors, videos, props, and sets—participants fell in love with an art form that was barely in its infancy. Critics were equally enamored with the new kind of theater experience.

 

“Prepare to be eased into a dream state by the choreographed movement, evocative props, encounters with performers, and music on a two-hour journey through a rich and reactive environment,” wrote the Denver Post’s reviewer, Joanne Ostrow. Sweet & Lucky, enthused the Huffington Post’s Tracy Shaffer-Witherspoon, is “a unique experience where life comes alive and the past is fully present… Lush, romantic, universal, metaphoric, and delightful―there is magic happening here and you feel it.”

 

Behind the scenes of the buzzy hit, a collaboration with New York’s Third Rail Projects commissioned by the nascent Off-Center program at Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA), the vision and creative drive in large part responsible for bringing the unique experience to fruition in Denver were those of Charlie Miller ’04, who as its co-founder made Off-Center a theatrical testing ground to generate new ideas, experiences, and practices at the DCPA.

“Like most arts organizations, the DCPA was looking for ways to engage younger, more adventurous audiences,” recalls Miller. “Off-Center started as a theatrical test kitchen where we could experiment with new kinds of experiences to appeal to the interests of those younger theater-goers.” 

Miller had returned to Denver and landed at the DCPA in 2008 after graduating with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard. During his senior year, he had the opportunity to meet the DCPA’s then-CEO Dan Ritchie while home for winter break, and he was hired by Ritchie and the DCPA leadership team straight out of college. Miller and DCPA Artistic Producer Emily Tarquin founded Off-Center in 2010, staging a series of experiments and test runs at the fringes of DCPA’s programming. “It was like having a party in the basement while trying not to bother the grownups upstairs,” Miller jokes. When Tarquin left DCPA in 2016 after helping Miller shepherd Sweet & Lucky as its first large-scale production and certified hit, Miller took over Off-Center on his own.

 

Today, as its Executive Director and Curator, Miller’s unique vision for immersive theater is attracting attention both at home and abroad. Named this March as a member of the Denver Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” Class of 2025, Miller and Off-Center have partnered with artists such as David Byrne to help build Denver’s international reputation as a hub for immersive art and entertainment, alongside institutions such as Meow Wolf and Casa Bonita. Off-Center alone has grown to engage close to 100,000 people annually, and its productions have begun touring nationally.

“I grew up going to the theater in Denver,” says Miller. “And right there on West Colfax was Casa Bonita. These were the childhood experiences that helped open my mind to what was possible.”

‘Love it even more’

Miller’s passion for theater was already burning long before he conceived of Off-Center: he began appearing in productions at JCC Denver’s Mizel Arts and Culture Center at age four. “After that point, I never looked back,” he says, performing year round all the way through middle and high school. He came to Colorado Academy in Tenth Grade because of the depth of its arts curriculum and, he explains, because “It was the one place that would let me do theater and soccer at the same time. Both were so important to me.”

Inevitably, he starred in numerous plays and musicals as a CA Upper Schooler, while earning the captain’s position on the Boys Varsity Soccer team, but it was an opportunity to direct a one-act play in his Senior year that became the turning point. “For the first time, I got the chance to think about the big picture of a production, not just my role,” he recalls. The same year, Angel Vigil, then Chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department, launched a video production course and put Miller, who had already experimented with the medium, in charge of creating the opening sequence for a class video project.

“Through those two experiences, I realized that although I loved acting, I actually loved it even more to help create the whole thing and not just be one piece of it.”

Hearing a filmmaker guest speaker in a special assembly hosted by then Upper School Principal Dr. Jon Vogels led Miller to Harvard’s unique Visual and Environmental Studies program (now known as Art, Film, and Visual Studies), where he could explore video and multimedia in the context of live performance, marrying the disparate creative avenues he had traveled at CA. Miller’s 2008 Harvard thesis, username: FAUST, was an of-the-moment look at video and internet celebrity, conceived just a year after YouTube’s launch. The piece, which included video projection and web content in addition to live performance, followed a woman’s quest to create the most popular YouTube video of all time.

Finding himself at the DCPA right after username:FAUST’s successful run, Miller pitched the idea of creating a multimedia lab where the organization could experiment with different ways of incorporating video and technology into theatre. The DCPA created a new position for Charlie to pursue this vision, and from that point, it was a short stretch to the founding of Off-Center, which, over the course of its 15 years, has grown from a line of underground programming to one of DCPA’s marquee offerings, mounting 67 different productions with 15,000 performances. 

The program’s high point to date, says Miller, came in 2022, when Off-Center premiered Theater of the Mind, the result of four years of collaboration with creators David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar. The project, inspired by and grounded in neuroscience, featured sensory experiments designed to take audience members through an immersive journey of self-reflection, discovery, and imagination.

 

Occupying a historic 15,000-square-foot warehouse at York Street Yards in the Clayton neighborhood, Theater of the Mind was the second-largest production in the Denver Center’s 45-year history, selling 42,000 tickets and making a local economic impact of $13.6 million, all while drawing rave reviews and national press attention.

“I have been moved time and again by immersive experiences, where I get completely lost in the story and experience pure empathy, understanding a perspective different from my own and connecting with a character or another audience member,” acknowledges Miller. “This ability to temporarily transport us beyond our own lived experience and to connect with a stranger across differences is what our society needs more of—and is what immersive experiences can provide.”

 

He continues, “I care passionately about the arts community here and want to help make Denver an awesome place to live and work. That’s why I’m motivated to create those transformative experiences for others. If audiences leave our shows thinking, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ then Off-Center has done its job.”

Immersive Denver and beyond

As a leader in an artistic universe that includes everything from the Las Vegas Sphere to escape rooms and virtual reality games—Off-Center’s most recent offering was the playable Monopoly Lifesized: Travel Edition—Miller believes that the best immersive theater experiences blur the edges of the real world. “As you uncover the story and interact with the characters, you start to assume a role in the drama. You’re completely present and fully embodied, in a way that a traditional proscenium theater experience cannot replicate.”

 

Still, he notes, the immersive entertainment industry remains relatively new. “It’s evolving and changing every day”—which, for Miller, is undoubtedly part of the appeal. He has been among a group of leaders helping to convene summits and workshops through the DCPA and Immersive Denver, a community arts organization. Dedicated to supporting and cultivating immersive arts and entertainment in the greater Metro Denver area, the organization offers education, community building, community resources, and artist advocacy.

“I love collaborating and learning from people in other cities and around the world as we’re all trying to define where the industry is going. How can we move it to a place that’s more viable and sustainable?”

What makes experiential theater so special, he observes, is the intimacy it facilitates between characters and audiences and, conversely, the grandeur of the spaces that are brought to life. “But there’s no economy of scale in either of those things. It’s just a very expensive endeavor.”

If anyone can find the thread that weaves together sustainability with grand vision and profound human experiences, it is Miller and his colleagues at Off-Center. The “innovation work” which he sees as central to the evolution of experiential art is much the same as the ethic of curiosity and cross-disciplinary discovery that is core to the CA education.

“Pushing the boundaries of what is considered ‘theater’ requires thinking expansively and challenging the conventions of the art form,” he states. “The Design Thinking approach that defines so much of what CA is doing right now echoes the cycle that allowed Off-Center to grow: Experiment. Capture your learning and create quick feedback loops. Iterate and try again. We started by doing very small tests and gradually, over time, scaled them up. Every failure became a valuable lesson.”

Other skills Miller traces back to CA play a role in his world today: Captaining Varsity Soccer showed him how to inspire people; directing plays and videos taught him how to organize groups, get individuals with different ideas and abilities on the same page, and work toward a shared goal. Strong writing and critical thinking skills continue to pay dividends, of course. Even computer science, never one of his main interests, became relevant as Miller has worked on integrating new technologies into immersive theater productions, he notes.

“Random things that I was curious about and interests I was able to pursue have all ended up being relevant to what I’m doing now in unexpected ways. Encountering new ideas and emotions, connecting with strangers across differences—you can feel something and be open to people in a genuine way. The work I do, and have always been doing, is to create more opportunities and more places for people to be human together.”