About us

The Hinterlands is a Detroit-based company who creates original, multidisciplinary performance works, explores the art of the performer through explosive and ecstatic training and play, and engages their community through direct collaboration and exchange. Our Mission: To create essential, immediate, and visceral performances which propel our audiences into a landscape of questions, possibilities, and unknowns. To develop training for the 21st century performer which integrates body and voice, content and form, impulse and technique, technology and tradition. To band together with our community to explore the unmapped regions of our culture, our world, and ourselves: the hinterlands.

The Hinterlands Ensemble formed in September 2009 and is made up of core members Richard Newman and Liza Bielby. Before forming The Hinterlands, Newman and Bielby worked with diverse international ensembles including Double Edge Theatre (Ashfield, MA), The Dell’Arte Company (Blue Lake, CA), Jinjiang Yishu Tuan (Chengdu, China), Bond Street Theatre (New York, NY), Great Small Works (New York, NY), and Changfu Jutuan (Chengdu, China). They have performed throughout North America as well as in Kosovo, Bali, Germany, Macedonia, Poland, Spain, and China.

The Hinterlands premiered Isaac Newton is Our DJ, an interactive dance party, science experiment, and clown play celebrating and debating the life and laws of Sir Isaac Newton, in January 2010. An early version of Manifest Destiny! (there was blood on the saddle) called The Dead Road premiered in Toronto, Canada, as part of the Cooking Fire Theatre Festival in June 2010. In October 2010, The Hinterlands mounted the second phase of The Breaking Bread Performance Project, a long-term collaboration between U.S. and Kosovar artists initiated by Hinterlands Co-Artistic Director Richard Newman. Partnering with Kosovo-based Artpolis, Urban Theater, and Balkan Sunflowers, The Hinterlands conducted workshops and created a non-verbal touring performance with a group of Albanian, Serbian, Roma, and Ashkali teenagers in Prishtina, Kosovo. The Hinterlands have been funded by TCG, Asian Cultural Council, The Puffin Foundation and CEC ArtsLink.

Contact us at: info[at]thehinterlandsensemble.org