THE HINTERLANDS: UTOPIAN DINNERS
Join us as the Mobile Homestead ventures from its permanent home on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit to bring a series of participatory, durational events to the Sidewalk Festival Detroit and Dixieland Flea Market.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
THE HINTERLANDS: UTOPIAN DINNERS
AUGUST 4 – AUGUST 12, 2018
MIKE KELLEY’S MOBILE HOMESTEAD
Join us as the Mobile Homestead ventures from its permanent home on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit to bring a series of participatory, durational events to the Sidewalk Festival Detroit and Dixieland Flea Market. Mike Kelley, who died in 2012, intended for the Mobile Homestead to remain relevant to local communities. With a clear social mandate to engage community concerns, the Mobile Homestead takes to the streets for special events, traveling to neighborhoods throughout the city to offer public services. With new programs at the Sidewalk Festival Detroit and Dixieland Flea Market, the Mobile Homestead will continue its mission of serving as a community platform by creating unique opportunities for visitors to meet, converse, and engage with one another.
Created as works of participatory art, the events—known as µTopian Dinners—are conceived and performed by Detroit-based performance artists The Hinterlands, Ava Ansari, and Renee Willoughby, with live performance contributions by local and international guest artists. The performances of µTopian Dinners are designed for people of all ages and backgrounds and are offered free of charge on a first come, first served basis. Participants are welcome to stay for one course or an entire meal. Everyone is welcome.
The Mobile Homestead will host performances of µTopian Dinners at the Dixieland Flea Market, 2045 Dixie Highway, in Waterford Twp. Visitors to the Dixieland Flea Market will be invited to join the Hinterland hosts at the Mobile Homestead to experience a guided, interactive meal. The artist’s will use food, eating, and the structure of a meal to playfully spark deep conversation and create meaningful connections amongst participants, both locally and internationally.
This will not be a typical dinner service. Artists will incorporate physical performance, live music, choreography, handheld video projection, long-distance calls, smartphones, and great food eaten in surprising ways. The dinners will guide participants through an investigation of national and personal identities. Building upon the community service mission of the Mobile Homestead, the dinners will foreground the idea of “breaking bread” with those across a variety of divides.
Participants will see how tabletop etiquette, culinary tools, and even what’s on the table can shift the understanding of ourselves and our neighbors, near and far. The performances are designed to rethink the typical American meal — what we eat, how we eat it, who we eat it with — in order to create new relationships, conversations, and experiences for participants.
Created by The Hinterlands with Ava Ansari and Renee Willoughby. Featuring: Alireza Keymanesh (Tehran), Amir Pousti (Tehran), Salakastar, TGIS (Beijing), Julia Yezbick, and more. Co-produced with Poetic Societies.
The Hinterlands (Richard Newman and Liza Bielby) use an explosive physical training practice and a lengthy research process and an interdisciplinary pool of collaborators to create genre-defying works that explore the possibilities of theatre and push audiences into unknown spaces. Their work ranges from psychedelic Westerns to imagined radical archives to border-crossing street festivals, and has been seen at the Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai, China), The Flynn Center (Burlington), Alverno Presents (Milwaukee), MOCAD (Detroit), Legion Arts (Cedar Rapids), Charlestown Working Theatre (Boston), Goodyear Arts (Charlotte), the Berlinale (Berlin, Germany), the Stamps Gallery (Ann Arbor), Teatri Dodona (Pristina, Kosovo), P! (NYC), and White Night (Chengdu, China). In addition to their own performance work, The Hinterlands are artists-in-residents and program curators of Play House, a Detroit neighborhood-based performance space that they manage in collaboration with Power House Productions. They also curated and organized The Porous Borders Festival, a two-day festival exploring the municipal and cultural borders along the Hamtramck/Detroit divide.
