Outpost uses a simple set up (9 chairs, 9 actors, a screen, projections, a bell) and concerns a letter written from Lesotho, southern Africa. The piece begins as a reading, but quickly explodes away from the page as the actors engage with the narrative and the 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 Little Theatre performance at Tonic. A distorted “travelogue” that couldn’t quite keep on track, the piece grew to include more actors as the ensemble struggled to find a form that would encompass what was happening to the text, as it became more than just 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, Mabou Mines offered Outpost more development time and space – and in June 2010 the piece was performed again:

We’re excited to find out what this next stage of development at IRT will bring. Outpost currently includes: a story from southern Africa, the Unabomber, 1950s Harvard personality tests, the Venus Hottentot, a U.S. Ambassador, Margaret Mead, Joseph Conrad, Zora Neale Hurston, the Thematic Apperception Test, white Indians in the Wild West, the Highlands Water Project, Decolonizing the Mind, Jungian archetypes and sex in the tower…

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. In the past couple of years, core members began to hone in on some ideas we found compelling. Outpost has given us a frame within which to “think about” – via live performance – those ideas. (www.kattlissard.org)

BRIEF BACKGROUND

For the past five 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) www.maketheatre.org As 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.

— Katt Lissard

ARTISTS

Current cast: Haleh Abghari, Kelly Coffield Park, Nell Del Giudice, Hall Hunsinger, Cecil MacKinnon, Sipiwe Moyo, Dan Shor, Seth Sibanda, and Katt Lissard

Director: Gregor Paslawsky

Katt Lissard was a 2009-2010 Resident Artist at Mabou Mines where she developed Outpost. In 2008, also at IRT, she work shopped another performance piece, Excavation. Katt was awarded a 2008 Lanesboro Residency, a Jerome Foundation grant administered through the Cornucopia Art Center in Lanesboro, Minnesota to create an environmental performance/installation piece with community participants and environmental activists. She received a 2007 Art Matters, Inc. individual artist grant for her ongoing theatre work in Lesotho, Africa. Katt spent most of 2005 in Lesotho on a Fulbright – teaching in the National University’s Theatre Unit, producing and directing plays, and researching the dramatic/theatrical response in sub-Saharan Africa to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As an outgrowth of her work, The Winter/Summer Institute (WSI) was launched in June of 2006, of which she is Artistic Director (www.maketheatre.org). A two time MacDowell Colony fellow, Katt is currently on faculty in the Individualized Masters Program at Goddard College and has been a visiting writer in the Master of Fine Arts Program at Long Island University, Brooklyn.

Justice will be served (2 FREE workshop performances of Small Claims):

Thursday, July 29 – 8pm, Free Admission!
Friday, July 30 – 8pm, Free Admission!

RSVP to info@humananimals.org to reserve FREE tickets.

Special Events:

Monday, July 26 – Justice (and beer) Will Be Served – As a kick-off to our residency at IRT, seven acclaimed storytellers will share personal tales of Justice – 8 pm, Tickets $9.99 (purchase at Brown Paper Tickets)

Saturday, July 31 – Benefit Performance & After-party – 8pm performance of Small Claims followed post-show revelry and borderline inappropriate conversation, 8 pm, Tickets $40 (purchase at Brown Paper Tickets)

All performances at IRT: 154 Christopher St., #3B

Tickets on sale here

Human Animals is a NYC-based theater ensemble committed to the celebration of the idiosyncrasies of the Human Animal. We believe in hungry theater, made by those who burn to practice their discipline, and embrace the constraints of our limited budgets as a means of creating innovative work. For more information on Human Animals, visit us at humananimals.org

Critical praise for Human Animals’ inaugural production of middlemen:

“Fantastically inventive…a darkly humorous allegory that might have been written by Samuel Beckett if he worked for Enron.” — Huffington Post

“Sharply written, funny, insightful…an extremely promising debut for the company Human Animals!” — Flavor Pill

“Human Animals is a collective “committed to the exploration and celebration of our idiosyncrasies.” There are plenty of those on hand in middlemen, so theatergoers are encouraged to be idiosyncratic and head downtown!” — Theatermania

“One wonders if this is what it would be like if Sartre wrote for The Office.” — Time Out New York

Artists

Written by
David Jenkins

Directed by
Sean Dougherty

Featuring
Christopher Michael Bauer
Jorge Cordova
David Flaherty
Cassandra Freeman
Jenny Mercein
Jeremy Rishe
Josie Whittlesey

Written, directed and designed by: Jamie Peterson
Performers: Haley Greenstein, Laura K. Nicoll, Ilan Bachrach, and Brian Smolin

3 Workshop Showings:

July 15, 16, 17 (Thurs-Sat) at 8 pm
Tickets $15 – purchase on Brown Paper Tickets

The initial design ideas for Little Fictions will experiment with the formalized voyeurism of the normal theatrical arrangement. The audience in this piece must engage in a more active form of viewing, dictating how they will watch the performance unfolding. The idea is to create a space that cannot be seen by the audience directly, thereby creating a natural barrier between the stage “truth” and the actual truth of the space. In one iteration of this idea, the audience is seated at cafe tables surrounding a closed set and served cocktails as the action unfolds out of view. Each table is set with a small television hooked into closed circuit cameras observing the space. The audience is encouraged throughout the piece to also get up and wander around the closed room, peering into the action from windows and cracks in the walls, from the eyes of paintings and two sided mirrors. Little Fictions is a play about how we change in a given circumstance, how we adapt and above all about who we are when we’re alone.

Sources for this piece come from William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition and Erving Goffman’s The Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life, which discusses identity as a kind of theatricality. Also, we will be investigating a cultural observation about the malleability of identity in an age of social networking, online dating and hyper-consumable culture, all of which in some way reduces the nuances of identity to a set of binary states, a set of criteria that defines a person more empirically. Little Fictions seeks to explore this new landscape of identity and what its impact may be when we start defining ourselves instead of relying on the perceptions of others to inform our senses.

www.thepaperindustry.com

Two work-in-progress showings:

Reservations: karaktar@gmail.com

Prior to development time at IRT, Take What Is Yours was supported by residencies at Naropa University and New Georges’ The Room, funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and public readings at New York Theatre Workshop and New Georges.

“Berg’s thrilling performance. She is an amazing talent that has grasped the ability to use her body, her singing and her speaking voice to create a fictional world around her. A Girl Joan is an exquisite work of art.” – Show Business Weekly

“… totally possessed by spiritual powers… striking.” – The New York Times

ARTISTS

(writer/performer) Erica Berg’s first solo play A Girl Joan, based on the imagined heart-life of Joan of Arc, was commissioned by and performed at Dance Theater Workshop, with subsequent performances at The Culture Project, NYTW’s Just Add Water Festival, The Present Company and HERE, where she was also awarded a one-year residency in their HARP program for the development of new work. As writer/director, her short films have screened at festivals worldwide; including the Salento International Film Festival Italy (BEST SHORT), Brooklyn Museum’s BAC Film Festival at the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art (BEST ACTRESS), Cambridge Film Festival UK, and the SOHO House’s “Best of New Filmmakers” Series. As a performer, she has worked with Martha Clarke, Ripe Time, and Ping Chong, among many others; and can be seen in feature films Synecdoche New York, The Savages, Little Children, Please Give, Trainwreck, and the upcoming Mr. Tambourine Man. Erica teaches physical acting at the Yale School of Drama and The New School for Drama, and is in development on her first feature film.

(director) Jill A. Samuels’ original work as a director, choreographer, writer, performer and designer has appeared in over 50 festivals across the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia. Jill was recently commissioned to co-write the screenplay D.O.P.E.: Dreaming of Paradise Europe, optioned by Wim Wenders’ Reverse Angle Pictures (for whom she Acting Coached the feature The House is Burning). Her original play The Perfectionist, written and directed in collaboration with Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo Theater, was selected by Borealis Press for inclusion in their New Canadian Plays series. From 2007-2009 Jill was the Assistant Director to JoAnne Akalaitis on The Bacchae, which premiered at the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park. She also was A.D. to Lisa Peterson on The Poor Itch at the Public Theater, and was granted an Observership with Ivo Van Hove & Toneelgroep Amsterdam during their work on the adaptation of Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. Jill has been an artist-in-residence three times at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, as well as at the HERE Artists In Residency Program, Voice & Vision, The Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Dixon Place. She has worked extensively on new plays with Ripe Time, The South Wing, Ken Rus Schmoll & The Foundry Theater, WaxFactory, with performance/video artist Deke Weaver, and with Peter Dubois on Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play.

Erica and Jill have met in the studio and worked together briefly in others’ projects, though are delighted to be collaborating together for the first time on bringing Take What Is Yours from the page to its feet. We welcome you to one of our work-in-progress showings, and look forward to your thoughts.