Community, Performance and Regeneration Residency

Memory of a Drowning Landscape

Memory of a Drowning Landscape: Transition

Redrawing Our Maps of the World

Next Residency: Fall/Winter 2021 – (On COVID-19 hold since March 2019)

Roma and the Malealea Valley, Lesotho

Since April 2016, I've been involved in a four-phased experiment to perform the resonance of place in Lesotho, southern Africa. The project, Memory of a Drowning Landscape, builds on the earlier work on the destructive impacts of dam construction, Split the Village, expanding that project's focus on the global threat of climate change by looking at local loss.

In collaboration with students and colleagues from the National University of Lesotho’s Theatre Unit, I began to explore the intangible cultural heritage* lost to communities visually, acoustically, and orally along the flooded Phuthiatšana River Valley in rural Lesotho – the result of the construction of the Metolong Dam.  Subsequent phases of Memory of a Drowning Landscape experimented with performance ideas around giving and receiving directions to places dependent on disappearing landmarks and flexible concepts of time and questions of who controls access to water.

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Work from Memory of a Drowning Landscape was presented at the American Studies Association Conference in Denver in November 2016.