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outpost

Upcoming 2012 Summer Workshop – Dates TBA

“I don’t quite know what this is, but you have to keep working on it … this thing has legs!” – Ruth Maleczech, after Outpost’s presentation as part of Mabou Mine’s Resident Artist Suite

CLICK HERE to view A VIDEO from the JUNE 2010 Workshop

Outpost uses a simple set up (9 chairs, 8 actors, a screen, projections, a bell) and concerns a letter written from Lesotho, Africa. The piece begins as a reading, but quickly explodes away from the page as the actors engage with the narrative and characters it elicits, and with tangents those characters pursue, and with the actors own observations and stories. It’s a partially scripted, partially improvised performance piece with infinite narrative possibilities, controlled and not-controlled by the actors – but also controlled and not-controlled by the audience. Ultimate power rests with the little golden bell.

Outpost began as a one woman performance as part of Little Theatre at the now-defunct experimental club Tonic. A distorted “travelogue” that couldn’t quite keep on track, the piece grew to include more actors as we struggled to find a form that would encompass what was happening to the text, as it became more than a Westerner’s interrupted letter home – the single voice of the letter writer fragmenting into multiple storylines and tangents as she tries to chronicle her experiences in one of our planet’s few remaining outposts.

The piece is still evolving.After the 2009 Resident Artist performance quoted above, Mabou Mines offered Outpost more development time and space – and in June 2010 the piece was performed again.

In September and October 2010, as part of IRT Theater’s 3B Development Series, we took the piece even further – adding more actors, more threads, and more interruptions. Outpost currently includes: a story from southern Africa, the Unabomber, the Thematic Apperception Test, a U.S. Ambassador, the Venus Hottentot, nature vs. nurture, the Napoleon of Intelligence, Decolonizing the Mind, insider/outsider, the Highlands Water Project, Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, Zora Neale Hurston, The Heart of Darkness, and Indian captives in the Old West.

September/October 2010 IRT Cast: Haleh Abghari, Kelly Coffield Park, Nell Del Giudice, Vanessa R. Evans, Audrey Hailes, Hall Hunsinger, Katt Lissard, Cecil MacKinnon, Daniel Shor, and Seth Sibanda; director: Gregor Paslawsky

We’ll return to the piece in the summer of 2012.

2010 May/June Workshop Cast: Haleh Abghari, Kelly Coffield Park, Nell Del Giudice, Hall Hunsinger, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dan Shor, Seth Sibanda, and Katt Lissard; director: Gregor Paslawsky

2009 March-May Workshop Cast: Nell Del Giudice, Tamu Favorite, LeeAnne Hutchison, Christopher Randolph, Dan Shor, and Katt Lissard; director: Gregor Paslawsky

BRIEF BACKGROUND

For the past six years, much of my artistic work/life has been connected to Lesotho, southern Africa. Since January 2005, when I arrived on a Fulbright to teach, research and direct shows at the National University, I’ve been navigating the tricky cultural terrain of the small, mountainous country and making theatre there.

Lesotho has the 3rd highest HIV infection rate in the world. In response to the pandemic and growing out of my early work there, eight colleagues from four countries (the U.S., U.K., South Africa and Lesotho) came together in 2006 to launch The Winter/Summer Institute. (WSI)maketheatre.orgAs WSI artistic director I’ve been part of creating ongoing collaborative theatre in Lesotho about HIV/AIDS, involving young performers from three continents and rural villagers from the country’s impoverished mountains.

My time in Lesotho has transformed the way I look at and understand certain things. Outpost is an attempt to take those disparate observations, stories, lessons, absurdities and incongruities and make them into performance. – K. L