Sherrine Azab and Jake Hooker overlapped during their undergraduate years at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, but it wasn’t until they both wound up in New York that they actually got to know each other.
Azab points out that she was the assistant director on an adaptation of The Frogs that Jake performed in during college, and that when they reconnected in New York City in 2006, both were presenting pieces in Target Margin Theater’s Hellenic Lab series.
“You could tell a version of the story where it was wild Greek play adaptations that brought us together,” she jokes. “But it more accurately began in a bar.”
Working together came later on. In 2009 the pair put together a trip to Berlin and invited friends and collaborators to join them so they could all make work together and perform on the same bill.
“We had an unbelievably amazing time that was full of all the craziness and wild dreaming that you would imagine a bunch of American kids making stuff together in Berlin would get into,” Hooker recalls. The trip was so fun, in fact, that they returned the next year and invited more people. After the second Berlin experience, Azab was presenting work for a series called Bushwhack (at Brookylyn’s the Bushwick Starr) and needed a name to present under; she decided on “A Host of People.”
Hooker was hooked. “I fell in love with the possibilities of the name, and when it came time for her to make another show, I insinuated myself into the creative process,” he says. After their show Life Is Happening to Us Again was presented in their loft in Bushwick, they began to think about moving to Detroit. “We like to say the company was born in Brooklyn but is being raised in Detroit,” Hooker deadpans.
Azab and Hooker moved to Detroit in 2012, and their company A Host of People is growing up, so to speak, in a turn-of-the-century (1907) house that, according to Azab, looks like “a mini-castle.” An octagon-shaped office on the ground floor features a chalkboard and a whiteboard wall, and the 1,000-plus-square-foot attic is in the midst of being converted into a space for rehearsals and intimate performances. “We are also turning one of the bedrooms into a bunk room so that we can host other small theatre companies for informal residencies,” says Azab.
Working with a partner has its challenges, of course, and Azab and Hooker have found that when they come to an artistic impasse, a third perspective is incredibly helpful. “Carolyn Mraz—AHOP company member and designer—is one of the best dramaturgs we’ve ever met, and has helped us navigate out of numerous impasses,” says Azab.
The plus sides of collaborating make the challenges worth it, they say.
“To be hopelessly romantic, there’s the fact that we are, together, creating our lives like we would a work of art,” says Azab. Hooker considers the very notion of starting a company. “It’s utterly bonkers to start a theatre company with anybody!” he proclaims. “And to do it in Detroit? And the rehearsal space is in your attic? You’d better do this with the person you love,” he reasons.
For now the couple is pleased to have recently concluded The Modern Woman, their second full-length show to bow in Detroit, and they are currently gearing up with rehearsals for The Harrowing, which Azab says “is a performance that will tour community gardens in Detroit and beyond.” Their series Performance, Potluck and Punch—where living-room-sized performances are paired with dining—and the Kreative Kool-Aid project, a salon of sorts, are ongoing.
Next year Azab and Hooker plan to go back to Berlin with both new and long-term collaborators. Says Azab, “It’ll be a return to where our collaborative theatre coupledom began.”
