Detroit performance company A Host of People (Sherrine Azab and Jake Hooker, co­founders) premieres their new work Re­Release Party (The Golden Record) with a performance run set for November 4–­19, 2016 at The Jam Handy in Detroit, with a subsequent tour of the show to follow.

Re­Release Party was conceived and directed by Azab and Hooker with performers Aja Salaskastar Dier, Chris Jakob, Torri Lynn Ashford, Sam Moltmaker, Emily Harpe and Renee Willoughby; designers Hooker, Willoughby, Dorothy Melander­Dayton, Chantel Gaidica and Billy Mark; and the production team of Gaidica, Maddy Rager, Lucy Price and John Del Gaudio.  Visit www.ahostofpeople.org for more info.

Re­Release Party 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 re­release 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 co­directors 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).