The performance work of Thomas Riccio is not easily categorized or labeled. This is as it should be. This is his fate, his destiny, and his life. He is an energetic guy, full of visions, thoughts and feelings who believes, “the work is what it needs to be, how it needs to be when it needs to be. Simply, fully be where you are, and listen.” His take on performance is as if it is a magical manifestation revealed, and he sees his role as that of some sort of trickster, a shaman, and a conjurer coaxing the invisible into visible form and living, breathing existence. His work is unlike any other I have seen or know of, it is one of a kind.

How did he get like this? Who knows? Circumstances and the times shape a person. He is a street kid from the inner city of Cleveland, grew up in a little Italy, went to a trade school, became a merchant seaman, a teamster, then a theatre artist, playwright, director, playboy, adventurer, and world traveler. From Cleveland to Boston University and work at the American Repertory theatre where he was research assistant to Robert Brustein during ART’s initial helicon days, working and rubbing elbows with people like Andre Serban, Peter Sellers, Jonathan Miller, Carlos Fuentes, Lee Breurer, David Edelstein, Michael Kustow, and John Madden. ART is where he was the understudy for Tony “Munk” Shalub, too. On to New York University’s just starting innovative program in Performance Studies and work with performance Yoda himself, Richard Schechner. While in NYC he was directing at La Mama, The New York Theatre Workshop (where he directed David Hyde Pierce) and then in Europe to direct at places like the National Theatre of Italy. Then, at 30-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. While at the Organic he gave John C. Reilly, who was just out of college, his first professional acting job.

Then on, to all places, to icebox in the middle of nowhere, Fairbanks, Alaska, where he taught at the University of Alaska, kayaked, hiked, lived in the wood, 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, becoming the director of Tuma Theatre, an Alaska native theatre company, for nine years. Then, of course, that work led to working with Zulu in South Africa, then to work in Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, the Kalahari (to work with the !Xuu Bushmen), and to other countries and people in Africa I can’t even pronounce, and then to Greenland, Korea, and Siberia to work there researching and reinventing indigenous performance. Why? Because Riccio is a bit of a madman, energetic and irrepressible, a generous spirit, a trickster of life and performance, which he sees as one in the same, an inveterate innovator and explorer with a can-do attitude from hell, which means he will do and go wherever he needs to. His motto: “Whatever it takes.” He is like an extreme sports thrill junkie. Riccio does extreme performance, just because he can, and because he has a sense of humor and near psychic ability to make him at home, and welcome, wherever he might find himself. And what is he doing nowadays?

He’s in Dallas, Texas, of course! He’s a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and artistic Director of Story Lab, a program in the making. A post-disciplinary adventure that is bringing all of his explorations, experiments, and experiences, together. As societies and cultures and traditional disciplines and media have collapsed boundaries, contents, and contexts, so too, must artistic expression. Story Lab is dedicated to allowing an inspiration and its expression to speak on its own terms, unbound by traditional structures of thinking, creating and exhibiting. The act of creation and the expression is, for Riccio, like a sentient being that must be allowed to be what it wants to be on its own terms and in it own time.

After years of traveling the margins, working with indigenous people the world over, doing field research with shaman, diviners, and other spirit people, witnessing, and participating in rituals and ceremonies, he 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 shopping center, home to thousands of strip malls, where consumerism is a way of being.  Dallas is also one of the major centers for telecommunications, information technology, and video/computer game development. Dallas, the “Big D” is the place with the “can do” attitude, a city like a naive teenager, immature, gangly, and not too sure of its identity. So, of course, Riccio is developing performances that blend technology and ritual, with pop culture, consumerism, and information control and manipulation—check out Kartasi on these web pages, and his upcoming Alpha Male. And he is into something he calls “performance immersion” whereby the boundaries between the real and artifice, truth and fiction, are negotiable (like our national politics and world for that matter) and where the spectator is not longer victimized by the traditional control-command structure of traditional theatre. His recent 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—is a stellar example of his performance immersion concept. And keep a look out for his upcoming Fetish Store, where Riccio will use the pre-established narrative/script of shopping (and the pre-inscribed consumer behavior and myths that live in each one of us) to create a store as performance and commentary on capitalism and consumerism. What better place for Riccio to be, than in Dallas?  Sure, he is still involved with indigenous performance, still going to crazy places—most recently the mountains of northern Vietnam—to work with traditional performance, and he is still committed to assisting, researching, and recording indigenous performance. Indigenous and ritual performance is just part of the big picture for Riccio, part of an emerging reality, where and when all of the resources and wisdom of human species is brought to the fore to create a new reality. Be it technology, genetics, ritual, shamanism, theater, robots, whatever, it is all part of the same forward motion to the spike or as Ray Kurzweil calls the singularity, or what the Yup’ik Eskimo call the flip. An event—when everything that has preceded human history will be transformed into something never before seen. Everyone and everything was once connected—as is the indigenous worldview—now the world is urging for a return to a new holism. The survival of the planet and its species may depend on it.

“The emerging global mythology is shopping,” he says. “The former indigenous people of the world, the people of place, are quickly being absorbed and are contributing to a new location-less place, a space we all share, the virtureal. It is space diagramed, shaped, and controlled by capitalism and democracy—which, by the way, have become synonymous. According to Riccio, the consumerism/capitalism/democracy matrix is the new dramaturgy that we are all immersed in, that which we walk and participate in everyday. Consumerism is creating a new indigenous people and has become our globally shared tradition, replete with its own rituals (shopping), gods (celebrities), magic (technology) fetishes (products), and mythology (democracy and the promise of equality and freedom). We are all a part of this emergence. We are all becoming earthlings, the indigenous beings of the earth, with shared rituals, languages, and myths. It is up to the artists to participate in that emergence and there is no better technology than that of performance to articulate that participation.”

This website is about the work of Thomas Riccio, full of documentation, but it also a resource, full of practical information, indications and inspirations. And like Riccio, it is a work in progress.

Enjoy the website…Franco Bolli