Overview:
This weekend, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance celebrates the opening of its Center for the Healing Arts with performances, classes and events.
After breaking ground in 2024, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance is celebrating the long-awaited opening of the Center for the Healing Arts, a 25,000-square-foot expansion designed to unite dance, wellness and community under one roof. The new addition will officially open Jan. 17 with a public ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“I think there’s a lot of folks, like when I grew up, who never thought they should take class because they didn’t have any money,” said Cleo Parker Robinson, founder and artistic director of CPRD. “Come and experience it. You’ll figure it out, and we’ll figure it out together how you can partake.”
The opening coincides with Denver’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations and kicks off a full week of performances, open houses, free classes and community events. Festivities begin Friday, Jan. 17 at 10 a.m. with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by public officials and community leaders, followed by a community open house from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., where visitors can tour the new facility and observe open rehearsals.
Now that the project has come to fruition, CPRD is wasting no time activating the space. The inaugural performance in the Center for the Healing Arts, “Raise the Roof,” takes place Jan. 17 at 7:30 p.m. The ticketed concert, which is already sold out, features the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble alongside guest artist Lil Buck and additional guest ensembles, showcasing a wide range of dance genres in the organization’s largest performance venue to date.
Additional events throughout the week include a community church service on Saturday, Jan. 18 at 2 p.m. in the Historic Shorter AME Church, led by Revs. Hughes and Holmes, with a reception in the new building afterward; participation in the MLK Parade at City Park on Sunday, Jan. 19; a student Arts-In-Education outreach day for local schools on Jan. 23; and a CPRD Academy open house with free classes on Jan. 24.
The reason the expansion is called the Center for the Healing Arts, Cleo said, is intentional.
“Well, I feel like the arts are [healing] — my personal experience has been that all my life,” she said. “When you are dancing, there’s nothing else you can do. You can’t think about something else, you can’t do anything else, you have to be present And then it’s not just you — you’re aligning with another human being and we need each other.”
That philosophy is embedded into the building itself. In addition to dance studios and a new theater, CPRD plans to host counselors on-site as part of its Arts-In-Wellbeing programming, intentionally pairing artistic practice with mental-health support.
“For those that needed more conversations to work through whatever they were going through, we had counselors on site,” said Malik Robinson, president and CEO of CPRD. “That’s what this space is now: having counselors on-site and also being able to participate in whatever discipline of art speaks to your soul, but recognizing you have to be intentional.”
Since 1988, CPRD has called the Historic Shorter AME Church in Five Points home, purchasing the property in 2021. Within just a few years, however, the organization found itself outgrowing the space.
“Once we were in the Shorter building probably for about five years, we started to bust at the seams,” Malik said. “It’s been a long time that we’ve envisioned launching the campaign to have additional space.”
The Center for the Healing Arts addresses those limitations by doubling CPRD’s physical capacity while remaining connected to the historic church. New studios are bathed in color and light, with specialized flooring designed to support a wide range of dance styles. Studio A features soaring ceilings, an acoustic piano and an integrated sound system.
“We were hoping to have Calvin Royal III come from American Ballet Theatre,” Cleo said. “I think he’s going to love this studio. I mean, he can jeté; the ceilings go on forever.”
The new space has already begun to influence choreography. “The first studio I had, I choreographed everything flat,” Cleo said. “There were no lifts and no jumps. I looked at the choreography; I was like, we were not lifting, we’re not jumping enough, and now we can. You know, the sky’s the limit, right?”
The expanded CPRD Theatre also introduces movable seating and state-of-the-art technology, allowing the room to adapt for accessibility, experimental staging and community events. Following the grand opening, the theater, studios and meeting spaces will be available to rent for arts development and public events.
Construction on the Center for the Healing Arts began in 2024 and presented unique challenges due to the historic nature of the existing structure.
“We have to preserve everything on the exterior facade,” said Tori Vendenga, Project Manager for Mortenson Construction. “In addition to that, we have Cleo being active in their space, so our construction activities had to make sure that we’re protecting this building and also keeping the safety of their employees and their dancers.”
They also had to update the older building to meet modern safety standards while also building the new space. To have the Center for the Healing Arts open now feels “pretty special,” to Brian Fitzpatrick, General Manager of Mortenson Construction.
“I mean, these projects take years, but sometimes decades,” he adds. “And you know, Cleo’s been talking about this for a long, long time. I really like to see her reaction and the reaction of the people within our organization. It’s the special part of what we do.”
Fundraising started in 2021, after the purchase of the Historic Shorter AME Church. Cleo described it as a “24/7” effort that steadily grew in ambition.
“We started at one place where I went, ‘How are we going to raise a million dollars?’” Cleo said. “Then it was, ‘Well, no, not a million; you’re going to need probably $5 million,’ and then it was like, ‘Well, you’re probably going to need $10 million.’” The project ended up costing $25 million.
Despite rising costs, CPRD reached its fundraising goal in fall 2025. More than half of all individual donations came from African American donors, according to a 2025 news release from CPRD, underscoring the community investment behind the project.
“This new facility expansion is securely rooted with the financial support of our beloved Village,” Malik said in that release. “Art creates a space of belonging.”
To Cleo, the building is about both growth and continuity. “We’ll figure out how to keep coming together and how we all need to be together and bring the uniqueness of our communities together and not let that dissolve,” she said. “To honor it and to really figure out what it looks like in a new century, how does that look and feel?”