Katt Lissard
Upcoming & Ongoing Work
Memory of a Drowning Landscape: Transition
Redrawing Our Maps of the World
Next Residency: Fall/Winter 2021 – 2022
(On COVID-19 hold)
Roma and the Malealea Valley, Lesotho
Since April 2016, I’ve been part of 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 of 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 end result of the construction of the Metolong Dam. We started by playing with ideas of giving and receiving directions to places that are dependent on disappearing landmarks and flexible concepts of time.
The Winter/Summer Institute Field Guide
I'm the artistic director of The Winter/Summer Institute (WSI), an international applied theatre project based in New York and Lesotho. We’ve been working on a Field Guide to WSI’s collaborative creative process – work that’s been interrupted by the global pandemic. We’re rethinking and reformulating a tool originally intended for use with live, on-the-ground community interaction and collaboration. The Guide will include a collective narrative tracing our history, process, mistakes, learning, methodology, and theatre-making – along with supplemental images, scenes, songs, and resources. But we’re reframing and reformatting our exercises, examples, creative tasks, templates, and dialogues to facilitate both virtual and live versions/options. Narrative sections will be posted on the WSI website in the months ahead.
Red State/Blue State: Creating Community Conversations
While most of WSI’s work takes place in Lesotho or New York, in late summer 2017, we took our collaborative process of dialogue and theatre-making to Chattanooga, Tennessee – a city that, like the U.S. as a whole, is deeply divided along political, religious, class, and racial lines.
Lesotho, Africa
For the past sixteen years, much of my artistic work/life has been connected to Lesotho. Since January 2005, when I arrived on a Fulbright to teach, research, and direct shows at the National University in Roma, I’ve been navigating the complicated cultural terrain of the small, mountainous country and making collaborative projects there involving students, colleagues, professional performers, NGO staff and members of rural village communities. My time in Lesotho continues to transform the way I look at and understand the world. My creative work is an attempt to take those disparate observations, stories, lessons, and incongruities and feed them into performance, writing, and community projects.
Along with my ongoing work as artistic director of The Winter/Summer Institute, I’ve also been pursuing two performance projects exploring the global impact of local loss due to global warming, climate change, and the environmental destruction of dam building and drought.
Those two projects, Split the Village and Memory of a Drowning Landscape, have used collaborative community performance and installation to capture the essence of place and begin to build a transitory cultural archive. The initial inspiration for this work was a 14 kilometer stretch of the Phuthiatšana River valley in rural Lesotho which was flooded in late 2014 when construction of the Metolong Dam was complete.
The spiraling Aloe polyphylla, pictured at the right and above, grows up to three feet across and is native only to the mountains of Lesotho. Like the country itself, it is unique and endangered.