Liza Bielby co-founded the space Play House with Power House Productions and The Hinterlands in 2012 and has been on the Play House programming team since it opened to the public in 2013. With The Hinterlands, which she co-directs, Liza is a performer and performance-maker whose genre-defying pieces and multidisciplinary events explore truth, histories, and hoped-for utopias. She has taught physical theatre at local universities and schools across the globe and shares her training practice through ongoing community workshops hosted at Play House. Finally, Liza playfully engages people of all ages in collective investigation of questions resonating throughout her communities through projects such as the Porous Borders Festival (2015), a two-day festival exploring the municipal and cultural borders along the Hamtramck/Detroit divide; Border Blast 2018 and 2019; and the “utopian dinner” series. Liza is a 2018 Kresge Arts Fellowship winner.
DC: Could you speak a little bit about the history and mission of Play House Laboratories?
LB: Play House Labs is a pretty new organization but we have all been working together and in this space now for a long time now. So the history of the space— Play House is a former two-story house that was turned into a small scale studio and performance laboratory in 2012. When it was first purchased it was purchased by Power House Productions, which was a neighborhood embedded, artist run organization around the corner from Play House, and Richard Newman and I lived next door to what is now Play House in this sort of artist residency called FILTER Detroit run by a woman named Kerstin Niemann who is out of Hamburg, Germany.
Part of Power House Productions’ mission was to enact neighborhood stabilization through art and design. They were helping neighbors and artists who were living in the neighborhood purchase houses, they were helping highlight the arts and culture happening in the neighborhood. We ended up getting this space with Power House Productions and slowly unbuilding it and reinforcing it and rebuilding it into what it is today. Then the Hinterlands, my theatre company that I co-direct with Richard Newman, became artists-in-residence and programmers of the space. We brought in Bangla School of Music run by Akram Hossain, who has an incredible history with Radio Bangladesh, and the Bangladeshi Revolution, and his work in music is very well respected around the world. They became artists-in-residence also, running classes on the weekend in Play House, and we would run rehearsals here and sometimes we would show works in progress, sometimes we would show full theatrical works in the space, and then we brought in another permanent artists-in-residence group called Thank You So Much For Coming, which is Scott Crandall and Maddy Rager.
Richard and I have run the programming here since the beginning, and we’ve done all different kinds of things from puppet shows in the backyard, to curating artists to make work about the neighborhood that reflects some of the questions that come up with a neighborhood like ours that is very transient and on the border between two municipalities, that is this place of people coming from somewhere else as a first stop here on their way out to the suburbs. We’ve done a lot of projects that look at that, that look at this border—and “we” in that instance is the Hinterlands out of Play House. So its all very blurry.
When Power House Productions accomplished their mission and ended in 2023 we had to form a non-profit to take on ownership of the space. We, with the folks from Thank You So Much For Coming, decided to join forces and make this organization called Play House Labs. Then the whole funding situation in the United States with art fell apart. We don’t have the kind of resources to commission, and before we officially became a non-profit, the Hinterlands would use our money to program. It’s all the same people, its all just bureaucracy. We’re still the programmers.
DC: Could you tell us about some of the specific programming you’re doing. You’ve got a film series, the Hinterlands also does Training Workshops, could you elaborate a little on these?
LB: Right now we’re working with Popps Packing and Ceramics School and Mothlight Microcinema on this de-centralized art school project. We’ve been doing Training Workshops out of this space since we started working in it, sharing with community members and adult artists of all levels and backgrounds. Those were called “Open Trainings” and later we started doing these more intensive series, and this partnership with Popps Packing and Ceramics School, and Mothlight, is to do graduate level trainings with different artists. Whatever your background is, when you show up to the workshop, I’m going to treat you like you have the potential to be a professional artist. Some of this is a response to graduate school being untenably expensive.
We have apprenticeship programs, we have Training Workshops, we have community sing-a-longs. We have very in depth work and its not like, “oh you have a BFA,” cause actually we don’t get a lot of people with BFAs, and we don’t get a ton of people with performance backgrounds, like theatre graduates. We get a lot of visual artists, a lot of musicians, a lot of people who are artists in different ways but are interested in performance and want to bring it into their practice.
DC: What’s the typical sample size for these workshops?
LB: Ten, sometimes fifteen.
DC: And they all come from different disciplines?
LB: Totally, almost always.
DC: And how long does that run for?
LB: We’ve done it different ways and we’re still trying to figure out the sweet spot. Right now we have some funding through the end of the year with this Popps collaboration to make them all free for anyone in the zip code or anyone who is low income—and the low income is a generous and realistic definition. We’ve tried like a month or five weeks where once a week there’s a session, we’ve done a four day intensive where you come every night for four days. We’ve done one offs, we’ve done it monthly, so there’s different formats.
We also bring in master teachers to do masterclasses. We just had one in April that was a chuanju artist, which is a traditional Sichuan Chinese opera, come give a masterclass/lecture. So that’s the kind of Trainings that happen with the Hinterlands. And then the Bangla School of Music has traditional Bengali folk and classical music classes every weekend for youth and for adults, and that’s singing, harmonium, and slide guitar.
And in the past we’ve had residence artists who would give workshops here. Like we brought one of the most famous clowns from Norway come and give a workshop which was amazing, we also had Ronlin Foreman who is a very famous clown based in the U.S. give a workshop. We have a great network of artists that we’re connected to and we’re trying to bring them into contact with this amazing Detroit artist community.
DC: So it seems like a connective thread throughout a lot of the programming is offering art education to the community and anyone who wants to learn these things?
LB: Yes and I would say the connective thread is no assumptions, I have no assumptions about whether you can handle experimental performance as an audience member, I have no assumptions about whether or not you, whether or not you’re Bengali, can go to an event that is all in Bangla language and is all about traditional Bengali culture. Everyone is welcome at all of the events. I have no assumptions that you, if you’ve never studied performance before, aren’t going to be able to participate and respond to the work that we’re doing in this training session.
DC: How do you measure the success of this stuff? And maybe that’s not how you think about it or how you should think about it, but I’m very curious about when art starts to take on this role of doing things beyond just offering aesthetic pleasure—like in social practice—where it is doing things that art doesn’t traditionally do, like education for example, how do you measure the success of it?
LB: Well I don’t think art should be used to solve society’s problems, but I do think that you have to have culture in a place. The United States is unique—not entirely— in its settler colonial approach to the world where you erase culture and the whole point is everyone’s culture gets erased: Henry Ford’s melting pot where you take off your traditional dress and walk into the pot, you are stirred out, and you come out wearing business suits and waving American flags. And this was like an actual thing that happened here in Detroit, with actual workers who lived in these neighborhoods, and when the M.O. is, “erase, erase, erase, erase” and the idea is that you’re American with no hyphen signs, and that the hyphen sign is a minus sign and you must speak English, but there’s no basis, there’s like no culture.
So culture is necessary for society to thrive and be healthy, and you need cultural spaces, and you need to share stories, and you need to sing songs, because creatures must sing and creatures must move and be in our bodies.
So with success, there’s a bunch of things—and I love this about Gina Reichert and working with her and Power House Productions for so many years, she’s so smart and talks about this in such smart and wonderful ways, where she’s talking about glacial time, and part of what she and Mitch were doing with Power House Productions is this slow approach to architecture where you wait and you look, “where is the sun throughout the year?”, “what do I want to do with this space?” And a lot of times this settler-colonial mentality, this white mentality is to erase everything that came before.
DC: Like the “tabula rasa”.
LB: Totally. There’s a lot of pressure, art funding is like a year. If you’re lucky two years, if you’re really lucky three years. But when you’re in a neighborhood you have to operate on a totally different scale and its very, very slow.
There was one moment I found of success and it was in 2015 and we had some money to do some more research about impact that our arts—this was Power House Productions, Popps Packing, Carrie Morris Arts Production (which is now Detroit Puppet Company), and the Hinterlands, and the four of us were working together on a bunch of projects as a way to match Knight Arts money and to apply for bigger grants together—but we took some time to do some in depth research about what people knew about our organizations, and how to approach advertising in a way that could make people feel welcome. And one of the things we did was we were mapping relationships within the neighborhood and I realized I could identify so many of my neighbors, like a huge swath of the neighborhood, and to me that’s a huge mark of success to be like, “I know two hundred people who live in this neighborhood,” and that is a huge measure of success because that’s what we need is relationships.
There’s something also about the responsibility to be the story keepers of the neighborhood, to like hold the stories of the different eras and different moments of a neighborhood because families are transient and move in and out.
DC: Do you think there are social and political responsibilities of your job, and if so what do you as the most important or most pressing at this moment?
LB: Well first of all, everyone has social and political responsibilities, and I’ve had really bizarre experiences running this space where people are asking me that question and I’m like, “what about you? What are your social and political responsibilities?” Everyone must work with all the means that they have to make a good society, and to make amends for things that happened in the past, and to make a great future for the little babies who need us—and for the birds and the plants and all of that. So everyone has that, and some people are definitely shirking that, and we let people shirk that, we let corporations shirk that, we let CEOs shirk that, and yet somehow we’re always asking the artists because they’re like, “oh you’re having so much fun and you’re doing your passion.” But I give all of myself, 100% of the time, psychically, physically, the art lives in me, I do the thing, I’m a performer, I channel these things or I make these things. I can’t phone it in. Yes I do what I’m passionate about, no I make very little, very, very little money. That’s all of these different trade offs. Minus the political reality of this country, I’m very happy.
But how do artists handle these responsibilities—1. I think is there is the absolute importance of people together in public space and imagining, using your imagination. That is so huge. And it is even more huge now with how addicted to the internet.
DC: It’s crazy that Bowling Alone was thirty years ago.
LB: I know and there was a lot of loneliness and sadness in that era, but now its like to another level. We’re just like enchanted by the internet, we’re in the box. And people have a lot of feelings when they’re on the internet and they bleed into real life, and there’s a number of people who are walking around disembodied. And the fact that there are all of these foundations are like, “we’re gonna do art and technology, we’re not going to do live arts and performance,” but actually post-pandemic that is what we need because we’re so hungry for contact with other humans.
So that to me is a huge responsibility. And then how do you create spaces? Like I am a white person living in a Black city in a neighborhood that is mostly Bengali Muslim, so like how can I go around with curiosity and no assumptions, and asking questions, and trying to learn constantly and be in community.
I feel like there’s something about creating embodied metaphors or spaces where people can experience the kind of world they want to be in all of the time, and how do you create those conditions? Not telling people how to do it, but leaving the space for someone to make their own connections and pathways, but to like practice, because you need neural pathways to make different kinds of decisions and not just repeat. What are spaces of practice where we can practice the world we want to be in?