Photos by Michelle Gerard
Mission
Play House Laboratories is a neighborhood-embedded artist-run organization supporting artistic training, experimentation, and collaboration in performing arts and adjacent fields, integrating performance practices into the daily life of our community, and creating public events that facilitate the exchange of experiences. To that end, we lead and host affordable workshops with high caliber artists, provide mentorship programs to emerging artists, and space for creative exploration. We offer development support to artists at various stages of their creative process, including artist residencies, work-in-progress showings, and performance opportunities. Additionally, we commission, present, and support works from artists, with a particular focus on works that feature international collaborations, performers working outside the United States, and works that engage with questions facing our local communities.
history
In 2012, artist-run neighborhood non-profit Power House Productions (PHP) and The Hinterlands joined forces to turn an empty two-flat corner house into a rehearsal studio, intimate performance venue and community space on the Detroit/Hamtramck border and thus Play House was born. For the first ten years of its existence, Play House was a project under PHP, programmed by The Hinterlands and Bangla School of Music. Programs ranged from weekly Bangla music courses to experimental theatre workshops to puppetry and clown performances for neighborhood youth to publications about neighborhood heroes and commissioned works that explored stories from around the block. Check out some of these programs in on our past programs page. In 2018, Thank You So Much for Coming joined The Hinterlands and Bangla School of Music as permanent artists-in-residence at Play House, and later Play House programmers as well.
In 2023, Power House Productions completed its mission and closed for good. The programming team/artists-in-residence who had been working on Play House since its inception joined together and formed a new 501c3, Play House Laboratories (PHL) to continue their work in and for the space. Play House is now owned and operated by PHL.
Since 2013, Play House has served Detroit/Hamtramck by hosting over 1,500 performances, classes, film showings, residencies, neighborhood storytelling projects, and collaborations. Located in the Banglatown neighborhood of Detroit, it has been a hub for Bangladeshi culture through weekly Bangla School of Music classes (750-850 classes serving more than 250 students) and quarterly concert events conducted in the Bangla language (35-40 concerts with a total attendance of 2,800 people). Play House is also an internationally-recognized center for theatre and performance training, offering graduate-level classes from both local and international artists at low-to-no cost. Through residencies, commissions, and presenting, and by providing space for rehearsal and work-in-progress showing for artists, PHL has been a home for the development of original performance and creative collaboration, supporting close to 100 new works from local artists including works of theatre, puppetry, dance ranging from contemporary to Detroit Jit to Afro-Caribbean dance, as well as sound installations, public art projects, and live electronic music.
As a neighborhood space, PHL hosts/has hosted public sing-alongs, block club meetings, community dinners, kids movie nights, dance parties, and pancake breakfasts among many other events, and provides space for community wellness and civic engagement activities such as Narcan trainings, voter registration drives, and neighborhood planning meetings. Its side- and backyard spaces operate as a de facto commons for neighborhood residents and an open air performance space in the summers. You can expect future development of this aspect of Play House Labs programming in the coming years.
Get involved with the work of Play House and Play House Laboratories today!
PLAY HOUSE PROGRAMMING TEAM
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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.
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Scott Crandall is an interdisciplinary performance artist, designer, writer, and educator based in Detroit. They create hilarious and thoughtful performances about horrible beloved crumbling America with collaborator Maddy Rager as the Kresge Fellowship-winning duo “Thank You So Much For Coming”.
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Akram Hossain, Principal of Bangla School of Music, has been a vocalist, instrumental artist, composer, broadcaster and teacher of Bengali music for the last 45 years. His particular focus is on songs by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, called Rabindra Shangeet, and modern Bengali songs. Mr. Hossain’s aim is to promote the exceptional and rich musical heritage of Bengal and to strengthen and unify listeners from East and West, young and old.
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Before joining The Hinterlands, Jenna was been a long term adventurer exploring myths and songs, forgotten stories of dead women visionaries and creating works simultaneously fantastical and rooted in human history. She created The City of Ladies or The Trail of the Red Shoes with the aid of Felicita Marcelli, was co-producer of Wistaria Project with Jeremy Goren where they were a Resident Artist Fellow at LEIMAY Cave, a member of Terra Incognita with director Polina Klimovistkaya and was a long term collaborator with the Open Program of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards with their projects in New York.
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Richard Newman (Co-Director, The Hinterlands) is an actor, director, performance-maker, and musician whose genre-defying works coax audiences to uncover lost histories and forge new futures.
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Maddy Rager (they/them) is a Detroit based performer and designer who mostly makes and performs work with collaborative partner Scott Crandall as the duo Thank You So Much For Coming. Thank You So Much For Coming received a 2020 Gilda Award and 2022 Kresge Artist Fellowship in Live Arts awarded by Kresge Arts in Detroit. Rager has also presented and performed works throughout the country, including The Hinterlands’ “Will You Miss Me?” and as the original cast member of Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Woman in E.