Thomas Riccio is an award winning artist, scholar, performance creator, writer, and director. He is currently Professor of Performance and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.
He is Artistic Director of StoryLAB, a post-disciplinary performance initiative based in Dallas, Texas and dedicated to exploring and promoting new, old and yet to be revealed forms of story telling.
StoryLAB is an evolution of Litooma, an ongoing ritual and indigenous performance and research initiative. Founder and Artistic Director since 1992, his work with Litooma has taken him around the world conducting fieldwork, workshops, and creating performances.
Previous positions include Professor of Theatre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Artistic Director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company and the Dramaturg/Resident Director at the Cleveland Play House. He also served as Associate Literary Director at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard and was research assistant to Robert Brustein.
Among his credits at ART: assistant director to John (Shakespeare in Love) Madden , dramaturg for Carlos Fuentes and understudy to Tony “Munk” Shalub. Among his free-lance directing credits: he has staged productions at the Teatro d’ Roma (national theatre of Italy), La Mama ETC, and The New York Theatre Workshop (where he directed David Hyde Pierce and Frankie Faison.)
He was raised in Little Italy on Cleveland's near west side, and went to West Technical High School to learn industrial arts and crafts. He worked on the oar boats as a Great Lakes Merchant Seaman, earning his way through Cleveland State University as a maintenance engineer, a teamster, house painter, and warehouseman. He received his BA in English Literature and then studied Yeats and Irish drama in Ireland where he developed his interest in playwrighting and travel. He received his MFA from Boston University and studied in the PhD program in Performance Studies at New York University.
He has directed nearly one hundred plays in nearly every genre, but is most at home as an experimenter and innovator. At 29-years old, he became the Artistic Director of the Organic Theatre, the off-loop, no-holds-barred-gonzo-experimental theatre in Chicago, taking over from founder turned Hollywood film director, Stuart Gordon. When at the Organic he opened the doors to the visual and performance art community and changed the face of Chicago performance and theatre and gave John C. Reilly his first professional acting job.
Then to Fairbanks, Alaska, where he taught at the University of Alaska, kayaked, hiked, lived in the woods, and visited nearly every Indian and Eskimo village in the state interviewing elders, learning to dance and sing traditionally, and creating a data base from which to develop a company and a methodology of community and place based performance. Riccio sees his work in the area of indigenous and ritual performance as qualitative deepening exploration of his experimental theatre and performance work.
He served as the director of Tuma Theatre, an Alaska native theatre company, for nine years. His reputation in the area of indigenous and place based performance developed into an expertise, receiving invitations to develop performances with such diverse groups as the Zulu of South Africa, the Sakha National Theatre of central Siberia, the Greenland Inuit, several tribal groups in Zambia, Sri Lankan Tamils, the !Xuu and Khwe Bushmen of the lower Kalahari, and a pre-Christian Slavic group in St. Petersburg. For his work with the Sakha National Theatre, Riccio was declared a Cultural Hero of the Sakha People. His work has also been recognized by a variety of indigenous and non-indigenous groups, including the Doyon Native Corporation (Athabaskan Indian) and the Museum of the North.
Concomitant with his work with indigenous performance and cultures, Riccio has conducted extensive field research in the areas of ritual, mythology, and shamanism. Such work is necessary for the performance projects, however the accumulation of the fieldwork and research now represents a significant body of cross-cultural material which will eventually be shaped into a formal scholarly study. Riccio teaches a variety of popular graduate seminars in the areas of ritual, shamanism, mythology, and performance, drawing on his ongoing research and unique field experiences.
He has conducted workshops and presented lectures throughout the U.S. and Internationally, among them Sweden, Germany, Finland, England, Denmark, Australia, South Africa, Zambia, Indonesia, Korea, Kenya, Poland and Burkina Faso. Recent workshops include: Jagielonian University and the National Drama School in Krakow, Poland, The Director’s Lab, Chicago, and the Great Plains Theatre Conference. His recent indigenous research was among the Miao people China with whom he has conduced research in ritual, folk and Shamanic performance. During the fall, 2009, he was an artist-in-residence for Lul Theatre, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. While in Ethiopia he conducted workshops at Addis Ababa University, conducted research in the areas of contemporary Ethiopian theatre and Orthodox Christian performance, and devised a performance entitled: Andegna (The First).
He was a Visiting Professor at the Korean National University for the Arts, The University of Dar es Salaam, and The California Institute of Integral Studies where he taught Drama Therapy.
His play, Rubber City was transformed into a musical, renamed, Comeback Für Elvis and ran in repertory at Frankfurt Oder’s Kleist Theatre. His play Inuit received a distinction prize from the Alexander Onassis Foundation. For the Fairbanks Drama Association he devised, wrote, and directed the long running and highly acclaimed production of PipeDreams, a play based on oral histories relating to the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
His academic writings have appeared in TDR, TheatreForum, Theatre Topics, Theatre Research International, Performing Arts Journal, and Shamans Drum. Mellen Press published his book in 2003 Reinventing Traditional Alaska Native Performance.
He and has been the recipient of several national and international grants for his scholarship and intercultural work, among them: a APPEX (Asian Pacific Performance Exchange) fellowship at UCLA's Center for Intercultural Performance, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Finnish Volunteer Service, among many others. His recent book, Performing Africa: Remixing Tradition, Theatre and Culture (Peter Lang, 2007); he is currently completing his book of travel stories and a book documenting his performance development methods and exercises, Body, Space, Place.
His current artistic and research interests include ritual and shamanic performance, creating a performance of place, and performance immersions and post-disciplinary expressions that apply video, new media, and site-specific installations. Riccio is bringing all of his previous explorations, experiments, and experiences, together--believing that as societies, cultures, traditional disciplines and media have collapsed boundaries, so too, must artistic expression.
After years of traveling the margins, working with indigenous people the world over, Riccio thought it was time to bring what he had learned back to his American culture. What better place than Dallas, the heart of Bible Belt (the ritual and ceremonial heart of America), the paradigm for American urban/suburban sprawl and excess, the birthplace of the modern shopping center, home to thousands of strip malls, where consumerism, highways, and historical amnesia is a way of being. Dallas is also one of the major centers for telecommunications, information and robot technology, and video/computer game development.
Riccio is currently developing This Has Been Fun, an immersive performance "store" and will showcase fragments of the work during 2010.
Dallas has also inspired Riccio to develop several performances that blend technology and ritual, with pop culture, consumerism, and information control and manipulation—among his recent performance installations are Kartasi and Alpha Male.
His notion of performance of place is also finding expression in what he calls performance immersion. There is Never a Reference Point—where the spectators enter into the consciousness of a woman with multiple personality disorder and witness/interact with each of her personalities—examples his performance immersion concept. For Riccio, multiple personalities are a diagram/paradigm for a modern way of being in the world. A video performance documentation of There is Never a Reference Point was an official selection at the 2009 Dallas Video Festival.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari a performance immersion, invited audiences into the narrative to move as they will between past and present, fiction, fantasy, and reality. The production was noted as one of the "10 Best in 2008" by Pegasus News.
His plays Orange Oranges and So There and Some People, which he wrote and directed, were produced by Project X in 2008 and 09 at the Festival of Independent Theatres and WaterTower Theatre. These plays explore Riccio's pre-occupations with consumerism, urban homelessness and how our sense of self and being in the world is undergoing a profound transformation. These plays are part of an evolving and ongoing series of works entitled, Simulations, work inspired by life in and around Dallas. His newest play in this series, TNB, deals with racial identity, culture, and ritual, and will be a part of the Great Plains Theatre Conference PlayLab in 2010. Orange Oranges appears in the current Sojourn Literary Journal.
Riccio was a featured performance artist at Dallas Museum of Art's All the World's a Stage exhibit, 2009-10.
Since 2006, Riccio has work with Hanson Robots, the world's leader in conversational robots, writing personalities and conversational scripts for several award winning robots.
He recently returned from Estonia where he conducted theatre workshops at the Viljandi Culture Academy and presented a conference paper at Tartu University on Robot: Ritual Fetish and Oracle.
