Training

Training is an essential element of our creative process: it’s a platform for creating work and a provocation towards the unknown. Its’s a way to collaborate across disciplines, and a way to engage with the world in an imaginative way. Rooted in a mix of lineages and practices, this ongoing physical and vocal training dilates the presence, energy, and awareness of the performer and builds the expressive capacities of the ensemble for each project. We regularly share our training practice through residencies, workshops, apprenticeships, and monthly participatory training sessions.

Our next training sessions begin in April: Poetics (of Performance), every Monday from 7-9pm starting April 6th and ending May 11th is a playful deep-dive into manipulating space and time, rhythm and embodied metaphor to make compelling time-based work and live more ferociously. For performers, performer-adjacents, and the performer-curious aged 18+. Voice, Body, and Song will take place every Thursday from 7-9pm starting April 9th and ending May 14th will explore possibilities of the voice - solo and in community - through the lens of orally-transmitted folk songs and ballads. While deepening our connection to lineage and place, we’ll play with songs as performance text and vehicles for storytelling, and experiment with resonance as a tool for expanding the possibilities of our personal as well as for building our collective voice. Anyone welcome, 18+. Both workshops take at Play House (12657 Moran St, Detroit MI 48212). Drop in, but we encourage you to come to as many as you can. Sliding scale per workshop: $10-$50. Questions? Want to RSVP? Reach out (info at thehinterlands dot org).

Are you interested in working with The Hinterlands for a two-month in-depth dive into training, creating, and building a personal practice? Email info[at]thehinterlands[dot]org to learn more about our apprenticeship program, funded by the Michigan Community Service Commission’s Community Center Grant program.

The Hinterlands were a member of the Training Consortium, a group of place-based and training-centric performance companies in the United States, with Double Edge Theatre, Mondo Bizarro, qStaff, Pangea World Theater, Ebony Golden, and Open Flame Theatre between 2015 and its conclusion in 2022.

image from Into the Hinterlands, a documentary film by Julia Yezbick