Re-Release Party (The Golden Record) is rooted in a project in 1977 led by Carl Sagan and a dynamic team of scientists and artists who created the Golden Record, a phonograph record which attempts to communicate the story of life on earth for extraterrestrials and future humans. The record, filled with messages from world leaders, greetings in many languages, pictures and sounds from earth, and a sampling of our music, was launched aboard the Voyager space probes on their interstellar reconnaissance mission, which continues to this day. In an evening that travels through time and space, A Host of People will evoke the original team’s story, while creating a new one asking the audience to imagine what it is to communicate our vast, yet puny, existence to aliens and to ourselves. Through artifacts from the original record, video transmissions, imagistic journeys, poetry and interviews, strange dances and original music, each performance will re-release a new Golden Record for that specific night, in that particular place, with the humans in that room. As with all A Host of People shows, a party will unfold, celebrating both life here and the possible lives out there in this vast and awesome universe.
A Host of People is an interdisciplinary, multimedia theater company in Detroit, MI dedicated to the making of original works. 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, The Kitchen, HERE, Dixon Place, etc.), Berlin (Ida Nowhere, The LynLin), San Francisco (Intersection for the Arts) and Detroit (HomeBase, The Play House, ArtlabJ, The Sidewalk Festival For the Performing Arts). We create live art around a central question: How can we host more people into theatrical works that are complex and multifarious; work that situates itself betwixt and between; work that is poetic, visual, nonconformist, and expands the viewer’s imagination, curiosity and spirit? A Host of People locates our work around the idea that “alternative” and “experimental” artmaking is not the elitist practice it is so often made out to be, but an inherently populist one. We strive to offer work that gives the viewer agency in their interpretation, as we work to entertain. We invite our audience into our art as we would guests into our home, whether it is in a house, on the street, in a gallery or in a theater.
