Katt Lissard/memory lab
memory lab is a loosely connected network of artists who’ve worked together on each other’s projects in a variety of capacities since the 90s – focused on experimenting with performance ideas we find compelling. Most recently, our development work on Outpost: an experimental conversation at Mabou Mines and IRT Theater provided a frame for us to “think about” some of those ideas via live performance.
Katt Lissard has been developing, with various memory lab participants, a series of experimental performance “conversations” into the insider/outsider phenomenon of being a global citizen. The first piece, Outpost, based on her experiences teaching and making theatre in Lesotho, southern Africa, was developed at Mabou Mines as part of the theatre’s Resident Artist Program in the fall of 2009 and the spring of 2010. She continued the development at IRT as part of the 3B Series in the fall of 2010. She’ll return to IRT this May (2013) to work on the next “conversation” – a performance/installation piece called Split the Village which is connected to her most recent project in Lesotho. Split the Village began in Africa in March 2012 and will be in-process there through January of 2014. The project involves the people, place and intangible cultural heritage along a 14 kilometer stretch of Lesotho’s Phuthiatšana River, slated to be flooded when construction of the Metolong Dam is complete (www.kattlissard.org/split-the-village).
Katt’s received two Individual Artist awards from Art Matters, a Barbara Deming/Money for Women grant, and two Fulbright Fellowships to teach, research and direct theatre in Africa. She’s a two time MacDowell Colony fellow, is on the faculty of the Individualized Masters Program at Goddard College, and is the artistic director of The Winter/Summer Institute, a multi-country HIV/AIDS theatre project that takes place biennially in Lesotho (www.maketheatre.org) – the project brings performers and facilitators from three continents together with rural villagers to create collaborative theatre in response to the pandemic in the sub-Saharan.
