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Sunset: A Techno Elegy

By The Hinterlands and Renee Willoughby 

PREMIERING IN 2025

Performance installation - May 22-24, 2025 at Play House (12657 Moran St, Detroit)

Stage performance premiere Nov 2025

A mythic telling of loss, transformation, and enchantment for the digital age

Down into the Digital Otherworld journeys virtuosic Orpheus in search of his lost Eurydice, enchanted  away by the mischievous Faery King…like a body and its soul rent in two - one party frozen outside of time in a world of illusion, the other desperate to return things to how they once were. But how to become whole again? 

Inspired by medieval retellings of the Orpheus myth and our collective internet-driven madness, Sunset weaves technologies old and new - mask performance, live video mixing, AI chatbots, electronic music, lamentations, spirit talking, automata, Victorian illusion and more - into a music-driven terrifyingly embodied work that mythologizes our relationship with technology, and how it has changed and shaped our imagination. Join The Hinterlands and video artist Renee Willoughby in the Otherworld of ones and zeroes as we wrestle our souls back from the trickster in the black box and break the spell that traps us in the algorithm. 

With support from the James S. and John L. Knight Foundation.

NOW AVAILABLE FOR TOURING:

Will You Miss Me?

Premiered Fall 2022

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The Radicalization Process

2016-2019

Layering historical accounts of the radical left in the 1960’s and 70’s with a master class in American method acting, socialist pageantry, and a gleefully obtuse re-production of The Living Theatre’s Antigone, The Radicalization Process stokes the embers of America’s past revolutions to ignite our radical potential. Audiences begin the performance sifting through a basement archive of a forgotten revolutionary, navigating histories true and false, real and imagined, before they make their way into the performance space, a safe-house within a house in 1970s Detroit. Imagery unfolds both mundane and shocking; a live-score is performed on analog synthesizers and everyday objects; L’Internationale is sung; an explosion occurs.

The Radicalization Process asks us to question our assumptions about what drives us to take action, how far is too far, and what role the imagination has in revolution. Also, it’s funny. Sometimes. Other times it’s really dark. But hey, that’s America!

Check out Rosie Sharp’s review of the piece in Hyperallergic. 

The Radicalization Process is an original performance by The Hinterlands premiering in April 2016, created and performed by Richard Newman, Liza Bielby, and Dave Sanders. Live scoring by Richard Newman. Scenic design by Shoshanna Utchenik, archive creation by Casey Rocheteau, and publication design by Benjamin Gaydos. The performance was commissioned by Legion Arts, Power House Productions and Alverno Presents with generous support from the National Performance Network, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the NEA Artworks program.

Performed at/with: Co-Prosperity Sphere/Illinois Humanities (Chicago); Ko Festival (Amherst, MA); Play House (Detroit); Flynn Center (Burlington, VT); Alverno Presents (Milwaukee); and CSPS/Legion Arts (Cedar Rapids) with a work-in-progress version shown at Goodyear Arts (Charlotte, NC)

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The Circuit

2012-2013

Classic American Vaudeville meets the chaotic energy of the American sub-culture continuum in *The Circuit,* an ecstatic, audience-engulfing variety show for outcasts of the post-industrial age.

Called “the heart of American show business,” Vaudeville is remembered as the variety show that unleashed dancers, musicians, comedians, trained animals, female and male impersonators, acrobats, children, and lecturing celebrities onto a single bill. Vaudeville was the place where different parts of the American subculture first met, eyed each other warily, and commenced the give-and-take that defines the American experiment. With jitters and juggalos, candy ravers and riot grrrls, *The Circuit* checks in on this grand experiment one century later in this hilarious and strange new work that brings Vaudeville into the Internet age. Think the Marx Brothers meets David Lynch meets the New Dance Show meets Bikini Kill meets something you’ve never heard of. With door prizes. And Faygo.

Performed and created by Torri Ashford, Barney Baggett, Liza Bielby, Jon Brumit, Richard Newman and Haleem Rasul. With technician Dave Sanders. Scenic design by Zeb Smith; lighting design by Aaron Weissman, and sight-gag design by Shoshanna Utchenik. Directed by Richard Newman with Liza Bielby. Early versions created with the collaboration of Eleni Zaharopoulos and Leanne Turrell. Funded in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and National Performance Network Creation Fund. Co-commission by Alverno Presents and MOCAD, with additional developmental support from Power House Productions.

Performed at: Trinosophes (Detroit); Alverno Presents (Milwaukee); CSPS/Legion Arts (Cedar Rapids); work-in-progress versions performed at MOCAD (Detroit); 2012 Shanghai Biennale Detroit Pavillion (Shanghai); Network of Ensemble Theater’s Detroit Microfest

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Manifest Destiny! (there was blood on the saddle)

2010-2011

A psychedelic Wild West Show inspired by the language of Cormac McCarthy and William S. Burroughs as well as the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1950’s and 60’s to confront myths of the frontier in Detroit and the legacy of American Expansionism in white bodies. Manifest Destiny! is equal parts Wild West Show and cultural scavenger hunt, weaving spectacle, vaudevillian comedy, live music, cowboy poetry, campfire songs, puppetry, dreamlike imagery, and the smell of frying bacon into a visceral collage. Using the script of Wild Bill’s original Wild West show like a prospector’s map, The Hinterlands have dug up a scathing passion play for the “frontier.” 

Featuring Richard Newman, Liza Bielby, Eleni Zaharopoulos, Steven DeWater, and Dave Sanders. Directed by Richard Newman with Movement Direction by Liza Bielby; Design by Anthony Cerrato. Produced by Alverno Presents.

Performed at: Jam Handy Building (Detroit, MI) and Alverno Presents (Milwaukee, WI)

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Isaac Newton is Our DJ

2010

A participatory, site-specific multi-media techno birthday party for Isaac Newton's 366th big one held at MOCT in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in January and March 2010. Using the party intimacy of the rave as a catalyst, Isaac Newton is Our DJ examined our fear of and propensity for interpersonal relationships through parlor games, karaoke, sporting events, dance-offs, lectures, shadow puppetry, and classic bar interaction. Two eccentric physicist hosts teach and tweak Newton's Laws of Motion in hilarious battle for love and science.

Created by Liza Bielby, Brian Moore, Richard Newman

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