Rhythm Reality Poland

Body as Text

(Re)Inventing Place

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

Riccio has traveled the world to perfect his method of “mining” the theatrical heritage of indigenous people. He talks to elders, learns the dance steps, collects stories and practices playing he instruments. The actors, here under the Riccio help his performers convert these traditions into performances.

The Anchorage Daily News

The meeting between the cultures is more important to Riccio than conserving cultures, which he believes, can, in the worse case, lead to cultural isolation.

Helsinki Messenger

Workshops you have conducted on creating indigenous performance, puppets and objects, performing symbolism, archetype and Africa, performance creation and presenting the story of AIDS, have been no doubt enriching as well as inspiring to Kenyan youth in general and artistes in particular. Thank you for you invaluable time and we look forward to having you once more for a longer period this time.

S.L. Anami, Minister of Culture, Kenya

In the desert there are two stones.
One is short and the other is tall and square at the top.
They are a hard stone. White and black in color--mixed up.
Surrounded by grass and small bushes.
They are by themselves out in the open--in the desert.
They represent man and woman.
The stones are called (n) Whatsu.
People came out of the male stone. All nations.
Cattle, animals, plants and things came out of the female stone.
There is a hole in the stone.
Trees came out first and were there when the Bushmen came out.
First an ordinary man came out.
Then the good doctor and bad doctor came out.
The good doctor walked on.
The bad doctor stopped at the tree.
People just came out.
The wind was blowing a little.
The wind sounded so nice that people came out.
They didn't exist before.
They all came out in one day.
The Bushmen were first.
It was hot outside.
People came out from early in the morning until dark that evening.
The stone has power, always--from the beginning.
People still live inside.
Near the stones there are many Bushmen paintings and foot prints.
At night you can see light inside.
You can hear people and their activities.
Inside the stone because they live there
Paintings are on the inside of the stone.
Then in the day the light is gone. Nothing.

"The Origin of the World." From interviews conduced during workshops with the !Xuu & Khwe Bushmen

Machai: The Bushmen have been bewitched!

Riccio: How does a bewitching happen?

Naka: The Bad Doctor bewitches them when he throws a stone in the direction who he is bewitching. When he throws a stone he curses them and bewitches them. Then the person suddenly becomes sick. Then they are bewitched.

Riccio: Is there a curse that has bewitched the !Xuu and Khwe?

Morhera: Yes, we are sick and hungry and away from our homes this is great sickness.

Riccio: Is this a part of the new story or is it part of the old story?

Silenga: It is the new story, the story we live now.

Riccio:And when did the new story begin?

George: When the bombs came suddenly one day. It was like a stone from a Bad Doctor. It is why we are here and so sick.

Performance had provided a fulcrum by which the Bushmen were able to revisit their origin myth. It also provided a form in which they could examine and discuss the issues and situation in which they found themselves. The origin myth, seen as living and viable when performed, became a reasserted perspective. The origin myth had exposed to us not only their history but the paradigm of their world view and ways of knowing and being. At a time when the !Xuu and Khwe were dislocated from themselves, their traditional lifestyles, challenged and fragmented by war, disease and cultural disintegration, the performance located not only where they had come from, but who they were. They had found themselves in the "old story.

from
N!ngongiao, People Come Out of Here:
Making a new Stroy with the !Xuu and Khwe Bushmen
TheatreForum, No. 10, Spring 1997