Wyandotte Man Pays Positive Experience Forward

Harley Miah volunteers his time and lighting equipment to help high school students learn how to operate theater equipment. He said he does this as a way of paying his own high school experiences forward.

In 1989, Harley Miah was arrested across the street from , where he attended.

A week later at school, Miah approached Alan McMillan, an English and theater teacher. On a whim, Miah asked him if he needed any help backstage in the theater. At the time, Miah smoked, had long hair and wore ripped jeans with a leather jacket. Despite his appearance or having seen Miah being arrested from his classroom window, McMillan welcomed the teen into the stage crew.

Miah found a positive use for his time on stage crew and met great friends. It also was the beginning of what would ultimately become his career.

Miah still lives in Wyandotte and has many jobs. He is a lighting and sound designer, programmer and engineer for various facets of the entertainment industry, including nightclubs. On Sunday evenings, Miah hosts and performs as a disc jockey on Burst Radio. Once a month, he travels to Philadelphia where he is a DJ for techno night at a club. It is a career he loves. He said none of it would have been possible without his experience with the Roosevelt drama program.

In the late 1990s, Miah purchased a set of lights to create his own business in the Detroit rave community. He said his timing could not have been worse. The rave industry all but disappeared and his equipment sat idle. Miah said he missed the theater, and hated the idea of his gear rotting away in storage. He contacted McMillan and asked if he had use for the lighting. They did a few shows together and Miah had fun doing it.

A few years ago, Miah began working with the students at Roosevelt by teaching them how to set up and program equipment. He enjoyed this experience and was happy to help Angie Kane Ferrante, founder of , when she asked him to give a seminar about technical production to her students.

The seminar covered a variety of topics, including safety, time management and learning how to properly wrap cables. During the next production, Miah said, he noticed the students were more prepared and their skill levels and work ethic had improved.

The AKT stage crew had learned so much, when they performed Godspell in a new and strange environment, everything went smoothly, Miah said.

He said he saw the opening of AKT as an opportunity to apply higher standards to the tech crew. Unlike a community theater or high school drama club, AKT is able to demand a higher standard of excellence from the participants, he said, as he can take the time to get more in-depth with students on every aspect of production.

“My goal is to get these young people to the point where I am now,” Miah said. “If they can do at age 20 what it took me 25 years to learn, then the sky is the limit for them.”

Miah’s own personal goal is to become a successful techno DJ. He said he is known as a lighting guy in the techno community and would like to break out of that mold.

In the future, he said, he hopes that AKT will be successful enough that the program will have its own technology and a few full-time employees.

Miah said he is very excited about the next AKT project–the student productions. He will be involved strictly on an advisory level and calls himself a “safety net” for the student stage crew. This show, he said, belongs to them.

“I’m really proud of them and excited for them,” he said.

He said he hopes the fundamentals and skills students learn through AKT will carry over to other programs they'll work with in the future.

“I want to make sure that any of the students that come through our program are prepared to excel at the next level, wherever that might be,” Miah said. “If you give people the opportunity and skills to excel, they often will rise above even the highest of standards."