Exercises

Since 1988 Thomas Riccio, a western trained theatre artist has been working with Alaska Native people. His experience with the Eskimo and Indian people of Alaska brought to his awareness a richness of performance expression going unrecognized and threatened with extinction. Riccio's work with Alaska natives has evolved into work with indigenous groups worldwide (see career narrative.)

Using indigenous performance -- ritual, ceremony, and celebrations a prototype Riccio evolved a method and style that realizes performance as a practical tool for people living with their part of the earth. Performance for people indigenous to place is a means to balance, heal, reaffirm, and maintain their community. A community that includes humans, animals, the elements, and the spirits. Performance is, for indigenous cultures, a primary and integrated holder of collective memory. Performance is a practical technology to reaffirm, celebrate, and 'balance' a group's existence with its place. Performance is, for indigenous people, a way to transcend the ordinary and material in order to assert the universal that lives within all things.

Riccio searches for different ways and means to transplant a peoples traditional performance culture into a modern expression to address existing social, political, and human concerns. He tries to find his way to the roots of a cultures myths in search of the power and origins of a cultures expression...Very often Riccio has noticed that he has become a bridge between tradition and contemporary times; often times he finds himself a teacher of tradition as well as its revitalizer.

The Helsinki Messenger
Helsinki, Finland

Gesture narrowly divides us from chaos.

Antonin Artaud