about & links
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, development work on Outpost: an experimental conversation at Mabou Mines and IRT provided a frame for some of us to “think about” – via live performance – those ideas.
memory lab for Outpost: Haleh Abghari, Kelly Coffield Park, Tamu Favorite, Nell Del Giudice, Vanessa R. Evans, Audrey Hailes, Hall Hunsinger, LeeAnne Hutchison, Katt Lissard, Cecil MacKinnon, Gregor Paslawsky, Christopher Randolph, Davine Randolph, Dan Shor, Seth Sibanda
Katt Lissard
I’m on the faculty of the Individualized Masters Program at Goddard College, Vermont, USA, and am the artistic director of The Winter/Summer Institute, a biennial multi-country HIV/AIDS theatre project that takes place in Lesotho, southern Africa. I spent most of 2005 on a Fulbright at the National University of Lesotho, teaching, researching the theatrical response to HIV, and producing and directing shows. In 2006, as a direct outgrowth of that work, The Winter/Summer Institute (WSI) was launched by eight colleagues from the US, UK, South Africa and Lesotho. WSI brings student performers and faculty facilitators from three continents together with rural villagers in Lesotho to create collaborative theatre in response to the HIV pandemic in the sub-Saharan. WSI’s work is ongoing. Split the Village will begin through another Fulbright at the National University in March 2012.
I’ve written about my theatre work in Africa for American Theatre Magazine; The Power of Words: A Transformative Language Arts Reader; and, most recently, in a chapter, “Venus in Lesotho: Women, Theatre and the Collapsible Boundaries of Silence,” in the book Feminist Popular Education in Transnational Debates: Building Pedagogies of Possibility (Palgrave Macmillan; March 2012).
As a writer and theatre maker, I’ve received two Art Matters Individual Artist awards; a grant from the Barbara Deming/Money for Women Foundation; and am a two time MacDowell Colony fellow. I’ve been a resident artist at Mabou Mines, the avant-garde New York City theatre, three times, most recently in 2009 and 2010, where memory lab developed Outpost: an experimental conversation, about the tricky insider/outside riddle of global citizenship. Outpost was developed further in late 2010 at New York’s IRT Theater as part of their 3B Development Series. IRT has offered space and time to experiment with performance work coming out of Split the Village. Other recent work includes a 2008 residency at IRT for Excavation (also with memory lab); and a 2008 Jerome Foundation grant administered through the Cornucopia Art Center in Lanesboro, Minnesota, to create an environmental installation piece, Mostly Water, with community flood survivors and environmental activists in the Root River Valley – a project that resonates with the new work I’m about to begin in Lesotho.
Links & Credits coming soon.