How It Happened: a conversation with Biba Bell about her apartment dance

Photo by Norman McDonald

(originally published 4/14/15 in Infinite Mile)

For six evenings in late February and early March 2015, dancer & choreographer Biba Bell performed It Never Really Happened (Part One) in her fifth floor, corner apartment in the Pavilion, a 1958 Mies van der Rohe high rise in Detroit's Lafayette Park.

Bell describes It Never Really Happened as a "triptych," a dance in three parts taking place in the same apartment in the winter, summer and fall of this year. Part One was a solo, Part Two will be a duet, Part Three an ensemble piece.

Part One featured a soundtrack curated by DJ Scott Zacharias as well as a performance by photographer and musician Nicola Kuperus, who played "the hostess."

Bell was born in 1976 in Sebastopol, California and earned a Ph.D. in performance studies from N.Y.U. this year. She first became interested in creating an intimate, site-specific performance that would explore the intersection of dance, domesticity and modern architecture when she encountered Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House at the Henry Ford Museum. But it is in Lafayette Park, the mid-century superblock just east of downtown Detroit, that the dance continues to take shape.

I have known Biba for about five years and have admired and written about some of her previous work in Detroit. After attending two performances of It Never Really Happened (Part One), I decided to interview her to learn more about the performance's development, execution, and many shades of meaning.

On the evening of March 23rd, I walked from my apartment in Lafayette Towers across Lafayette Plaisance to the Pavilion, where I joined her for a homemade dinner, a bottle of wine and two hours of conversation. What follows is an edited and illustrated transcript of our talk, divided into ten sections and preceded by a sketch of the performance for readers who did not have the chance to attend it.

Read the rest at Infinite Mile.

Two about the Hinterlands

Two articles that I wrote concerning The Hinterlands, a marvelous experimental performance group in Detroit, came out this week in two different publications.

The first, in Model D, tells the story of Play House, the Hinterlands' home in Banglatown, which was created with the help of Power House Productions as part of their innovative neighborhood stabilization work. 

Photo courtesy The Hinterlands. 

The second, in Infinite Mile, a new-ish online journal of Detroit art & culture, is an account of my experience attending a Hinterlands "open training" session. Open trainings are weird, wonderful, intensely physical workshops for performers and non-performers alike that take place monthly at Play House (the next one is tomorrow!).

Open training 2012 at the Jam Handy. Photo by Richard Newman.

Palmer Park's turnaround and neighborhood revival

Photo by Marvin Shaouni

(originally published 1/28/14 in Model D)

1: A brief history of an exquisite neighborhood

In the 1870s, lumber baron and U.S. Senator Thomas Palmer inherited 160 acres of land from his mother in the area we know today as Palmer Park. (For a longer history that includes the pre-Palmer days, check out this delightful Souvenir and Illustrated History of Palmer Park from 1908.) After continuing to acquire neighboring parcels over the next decade, Palmer eventually came to own around 800 acres in what was then known as Greenfield Township.

Senator Palmer used much of the land as a horse and cattle farm, while his wife Lizzie employed noted landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Eliot to design a resplendent park that included two lakes, islands, and miles of winding paths.

In the 1890s, the conservation-minded Palmer deeded the park land to the City of Detroit, on the condition that the virgin forest on site be preserved. Subsequent years found the remainder of Palmer's vast land holdings around the park and forest turned into a golf course, the august Palmer Woods neighborhood (north of the park), and the Palmer Park apartment district (immediately south).

The first apartment building to be built in the apartment district was the Albert Kahn-designed Walbri Court in 1925. What followed were 40 dizzying years of glamorous, upscale apartment construction, resulting in dozens of buildings variously designed in the Egyptian, Spanish, Mediterranean, Venetian, Tudor, Moorish Revival, Georgian, Art Moderne, and Modern styles.

This exquisite neighborhood -- bordered by Woodward to the east, the park itself on its northern edge, Pontchartrain Blvd to the west and McNichols to the south -- was home to much of Detroit's Jewish community from the 1920s until the late '70s, when Temple Israel moved from Palmer Park to West Bloomfield.

In the meantime, it had also become the locus of Detroit's gay community. From the '50s until the '80s, the apartment district was Detroit's "gayborhood," where large numbers of gay men lived in close proximity and walked to nearby, gay-owned restaurants, bars, and stores.

Gregory Piazza lived in the district from 1974 to 1991 and remembers it as "the most exciting place I've ever lived." Piazza, who is responsible for the district'snational historic designation, recalls that the gay population stabilized the neighborhood in the wake of the Jewish migration to the suburbs; but gays, too, were soon leaving in droves, heading north to Ferndale and Royal Oak in the wake of a long crime wave that, they felt, the police were not taking seriously.

From the '80s to the first decade of the 21st century, Palmer Park earned and maintained a reputation for seediness. The apartment district destabilized as the money moved north, the buildings began to empty out and decay, and the park became known as a hotbed of drug activity and prostitution. Rochelle Lento, who moved to Palmer Woods in 1991, quickly realized that the historic park she was so excited to live nearby was no place to take her children.

As recently as 2007, Clinton Griffin, who moved back home to Detroit from abroad to take care of his grandparents and raise his young great nephew, decided there was "no way" he would be taking his child to the park to play, even though he moved into a building that overlooked it.

2007, though, is also the year that the district and the park's twinned revitalization really got started -- that's when husband and wife developer team Mark Leipsitz and Kathy Makino-Leipsitz fell in love with the apartment district and started dreaming.

Read the rest at Model D.

Green City Diaries: Fab Lab and the language of nature

Photo by Marvin Shaouni

(originally published 11/12/13 in Model D)

What can we learn from observing the self-sustaining ecosystems of the natural world? And with that knowledge, how can we design systems of our own, systems of all kinds, that mimic the intrinsic balance of ecosystems, with their capacity for diversity, renewal, and the transformation of waste into energy?

These are the kinds of big questions posed by practitioners of permaculture, an approach to systems design with deep roots in agriculture but implications for, well, just about everything.

Permaculture (the word is a portmanteau of "permanent" and "agriculture," as well as "permanent" and "culture") was developed in the 1970s by Tasmanians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. Reacting against industrial agricultural practices they found both wasteful and harmful, Mollison and Holmgren articulated an agricultural philosophy and practice inspired by natural systems.

Based on three fundamental values -- care for the Earth, care for people, and return of surplus -- Mollison and Holmgren's ethic emphasizes mutually sustaining relationships between living things and the intentional design of agricultural space to encourage such relationships. In essence, it's farming that works with nature, rather than against it, seeking to eliminate both waste and external "inputs" like pesticides, herbicides, water, and fertilizers. (Similar agricultural systems, called by different names, were developed around the same time by Sepp Holzer in Austria and Masanobu Fukuoka in Japan.)

As its adherents have grown in number and diversity over the decades, permaculture has been applied to systems outside agriculture, as well, including landscape design, planning, and architecture. But as a way of understanding and living in the world, its potential applications are even broader. "Everyone," as Detroit permaculturalist Kate Devlin puts it, "can incorporate some permaculture into their lives."

Read the rest at Model D.

Green City Diaries: Honeybee buzz

Photo by Marvin Shaouni

(originally published 8/6/13 in Model D.)


The day before we get together to talk about her honeybees, Bette Huster calls to tell me she's lost one of two hives she keeps in the city. 'It's colony collapse,' she says. 'A few days ago, there were more than 10,000 bees. Now they're mostly gone. There are still a couple hanging around, but production has ceased, if you will.'

We visit the hive the next day and sure enough, the scene before us is entirely different than the one at her other hive a few miles away, which teems with the purposeful, collective labor of thousands of bees. Here, it's still and quiet. We can see five or six bees crawling on the outside, but also flies -- a bad sign.
I ask Bette what happened. Where did all the bees go? She shrugs. 'I have a theory.' An industrial operation nearby recently cleared a neighboring field of dandelions. If the bees ingested the chemicals used to kill the dandelions, their 'GPS system,' as Bette puts it, might have been damaged. After that, 'maybe one set of bees went out foraging, and they couldn't find their way back. Then another went out, and they couldn't find their way back.' But that's just a guess.

Research into the causes of colony collapse disorder (CCD), which has been drastically reducing honeybee populations in North America and Europe since 2006, is ongoing. One likely cause seems to be an increase in the use of neonicotinoids, pesticides chemically related to nicotine. (So likely that just a few months ago, the European Union began enforcing a two-year ban on the chemicals.) There are other possible (and possibly interrelated) causes: mites, parasites, malnutrition, habitat loss. In large-scale commercial beekeeping, which has been hit especially hard by CCD, the cultivation of crop monocultures is a suspect.

But even before anyone had started talking about CCD in earnest, honeybees in North America were having a hard time. Roger Sutherland, the president of the Southeast Michigan Beekeepers Association (SEMBA), tells me that the problems started in the 1980s. That's when the varroa mite and nosema parasite began wreaking havoc on honeybee colonies; 30 years later, both remain a serious threat.

In Michigan, harsh winters have been another significant problem. Honeybees stick around when the cold weather settles, burrowing deep inside their hives to keep each other warm. There are ways that beekeepers can winterize hives, but some loss is almost inevitable. The feral bee population, meanwhile, is particularly susceptible to winter loss.

The long and short of it is that apis mellifera, the European honeybee that was brought to North America by English colonists in 1622 and has thrived here for centuries, is in trouble. And over the decades, as honeybees' health has become more and more threatened, the practice of small-scale beekeeping has declined, especially in cities -- until now.

Read the rest at Model D.

Zaha Hadid tells it slant: the Broad Museum in pictures

A few weeks ago, I made an architecture pilgrimage to East Lansing, of all places, to see the much-ballyhooed Broad Art Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid.

I've been interested in Hadid's work since 2006, when I caught her difficult, dazzling retrospective at the Guggenheim in NYC (an eye-opening experience, to say the least).

The Broad, which opened in November, is only Hadid's second building in the US, after the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Living in Detroit, where we are basically not allowed to have exciting new buildings (we have too many old ones to fix up first), I was pretty giddy about the whole thing.

My initial impression was that, from the street, it hardly looks like a building at all. It seems to lack the familiar markers: doors, signage and windows are all enveloped by the corrugated steel. It looks, at first, like a huge sculpture, sleek and lurking, not a functional building.

There are doors, of course, plenty of windows, and even signage, but it all takes a few minutes to register.

See? Doors & windows, just like your grandmother's art museum had.

I spent a couple hours exploring the building outside & in, and those initial impressions aside, I found it to be thoroughly functional. OK, of course the architecture steals the show, but it's actually a modestly-sized museum at 46,000 square feet spread over three stories, so once you get used to all the crazy diagonal lines and beautiful staircases, the art comes to the fore and you realize that the whole thing's perfectly navigable and there's plenty of space for the works on display to do their thing.

It takes you a minute to get there, though. First you have to deal with those diagonals.

There's barely a right angle in the place. The effect is disorienting, exhilarating, and ultimately mind-altering. (When I got home that evening and for a good day or two afterward, I kept looking around at all the straight lines in the world and thinking, "Why straight up & down? Who said so? How boring! How expected!") The even line that makes a square is a lie (or at least completely arbitrary), Zaha's queer new building shouts -- a bold challenge to the handsome, if business-as-usual buildings that surround it.

Anyway, it's a lot of fun. It's a contemporary art museum that's a piece of contemporary art itself, off-kilter, insistently other, aggressive, radical -- and, for better or worse, eminently brandable. It's a vivid & exciting piece of new architecture on such a stately, conservative, and otherwise coherent college campus. The president of Michigan State says that it's an important symbol of the university's "quality and reach...in this competitive global marketplace." Whatever its reason for being, I'm just glad it is. Here are my favorite shots:

Green City Diaries: Dig This

Photo by Marvin Shaouni.

(originally published 6/18/13 in Model D.)

People have been growing food in Detroit, off and on, for centuries. Today, it's clear that urban agriculture is an essential part of our post-industrial identity. Even city government has gotten behind the movement, finally passing an urban ag ordinance just a few months ago. As more and more people choose to live lives here that are at once urban and rooted to the earth, important questions emerge: how much do we really know about the soil in Detroit, for instance, and how has it changed over time?

Urban soils, it turns out, are a vastly understudied phenomenon. In Southeast Michigan, as in many parts of the country, regional soil surveys conducted by the USDA have historically stopped at the city limits. It's a problem of both scale and complexity: urban activity has rendered the soil conditions so variable that the undertaking would be enormous. Two samples collected just a few feet from one another are likely to have wildly different compositions. Multiply that by 139 square miles and you start to see the problem.

There are Detroiters, however, who spend much of their lives working in and thinking about the soil, and their insights can provide a fascinating glimpse of the complex and surprising world beneath our feet.

Read the rest at Model D.