About

MissioN

A Host of People is a multi-racial Detroit-based ensemble theater company creating original work that celebrates imagination, complexity, and the synthesis of seemingly disparate elements—at once epic and intimate, political and personal, poetic and approachable. AHOP exists to create aesthetically rigorous, intellectually challenging theater that is warm, welcoming, and inspiring to people from all walks of life. We choose our subject matter and themes carefully with an eye to stories, topics, and aesthetic approaches that will be equally thrilling to the most adventurous  theater fans as well as those with less exposure to the form. This is how A Host of People moves people: we play with the light and the dark; the head and the heart.

Equity

Since its inception, A Host of People has been committed to creating theater that is fundamentally rooted in justice. We believe in creating a theater that reflects the world we want to live in and celebrates a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical/mental/sensory dis/ability, class, national origin, body type and size, religion, language, cultural heritage, age, and aesthetics. We work towards this wide spectrum of representation in both our collaborators and our audiences and always strive to create spaces of creativity that are brave, challenging, and generative. We seek partners, colleagues, and collaborators who are like-minded in their commitment to anti-racism and anti-oppression work and who will help us stay mindful of these base values. Equity is a verb—we situate it in our work. We commit to the unflattening of our identities, pushing back against assimilation, and bringing our whole selves to the process.

HistorY

The company is led by co-directors Sherrine Azab and Jake Hooker, whose work has been seen, together and separately, in New York (The Bushwick Starr, The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Kitchen, HERE, Dixon Place, etc.), Berlin (Ida Nowhere, The Lyn-Lin), San Francisco (Intersection for the Arts, Fury Factory Festival), Cleveland (Cleveland Public Theatre), New Orleans (Catapult), Detroit (HomeBase, The Play House, ArtlabJ, The Sidewalk Festival For the Performing Arts, The Jam Handy, Light Box, Andy) and elsewhere.

Since 2012, the company has created and produced six original evening-length works, curated/presented multiple installments of two distinct performance series, toured to several U.S. cities, and developed an in-school "arts-forward" educational program that is closely tied to our productions. In 2014, 2016, and 2019 A Host of People was a recipient of the Knight Arts Challenge Detroit Award and, in 2018, co-directors Sherrine Azab and Jake Hooker were Kresge Artist Fellows.

Vision

We create art around these questions: How can we host more people into theatrical works that are complex and multifarious; work that is poetic, visual, multi-focal, and frees the viewer’s imagination, curiosity and spirit? We draw from existing literary works (Time! and/or Progress?, Cleopatra Boy), collaged texts (Life Is Happening To Us Again), historical figures (The Modern Woman, Re-Release Party), social movements (The Harrowing), and personal story (Neither There, Nor Here), among other sources. In addition to producing 1-2 shows a year, we curate a series called Performance, Potluck, and Punch that pairs two short, living room-sized performances in our home and invites our neighbors in for the price of a dish to share. In 2017, we inaugurated SUPERYOU: A Queer Performance Event.

We invite audiences into our art as we would guests into our home, whether it is in our house, on the street, in a garden, or in a theater.