Twelve Moons
Workshop + Rehearsal
Korean National University for the Arts
RICCIO: The actors, if they’re of the culture, will tell me. It isn’t me making the decision; they tell me if it’s gone too far. I’ll suggest things, and if they react negatively, well then that’s fine. I don’t take it personally. It’s basically a group dynamic consensus, which is the model that we maintain.
Consensus is the organizational model—it’s slower, and more complicated, but ultimately more satisfying. It’s evolved from traditional Yup’ik and Inupiat ways.
SEEDS: Do they ever push it politically father than you would have?
RICCIO: No. They make the discoveries. Once they get into the flow of it, they get confident, then they will push it. The big issue I find, when working with indigenous peoples, is their confidence level.
They are less likely to be confident about what they’re expressing or about themselves than non-native people are.
This is because I, we, are from the dominant culture, and whether we want it or not, we have this attitude that we know more, that we do it right, and that we are the caretakers of the general welfare. This seems to be implicit with who we are—our cultural psyche. I try to let them see their value, to provoke them to assume that level of confidence. Then they will push it.
When I read Sardaana, which is essentially a well-known children’s story, the political metaphor was not apparent to the cast. When I first proposed Sardaana, they were skeptical.
Then I suggested “How about Sardaana goes on the road, but the bear she meets is the Russian bear?”
They all went “A-ha” and smiled! It hit a nerve. Then I knew the right direction to go. That one spice, that one idea, conditioned all our work. It opened up the vocabulary as to how we could mix and match. For them to do another Sardaana would not be very innovative. In fact the producer said, “I expected more from you” [laughter].
He actually told me this at a meeting, and here I was concerned with this very issue of going too far politically.
He said, “I want you to do something that I don’t understand. I go to these international festivals, I see things I don’t understand and I want to do this at my theatre.”
He wanted me to be deliberately experimental, and to push his group because he felt the group was getting stagnant, but he didn’t know what to do because he was on the inside. He empowered me to “rough things up.”
Then, as things started getting more unusual, I could see he was getting a bit concerned. It was like he was gulping for air. At one rehearsal I sensed that felt he had set me loose and shouldn’t have. But at that point, the actors were already so excited that I had opened a chink in the wall, and they flowed through it, knocking it down.
SEEDS: Do these cross-cultural performances create a bridge for indigenous people to move back to more traditional performance practices? How does it help them gain a sense of their own culture?
RICCIO: Sure, but it’s a bridge forward as well as back. I think for a lot of the peoples I work with, the traditional, rigid culture is looked at as useless, especially for a lot of the young people. It doesn’t speak to them anymore. It talks to them of another world, the world of their elders. Because of that, it’s dying, it’s not living anymore.
My objective is to identify, from traditional culture, a pattern—I call it the “DNA” of their cultural performance—and that is what we bring forward, using whatever is applicable from the traditional mentality, but then letting it intermix freely with their contemporary voices and images. What’s important is that this shift is deeply rooted in the patterns of the culture itself, its worldview, and its cosmology.
They have an important point of view that needs to be heard. We’re bringing it forward, revitalized it. I assist them in reimagining their own culture and its own worth. I think, as an outsider, maybe that’s something I can do, maybe with more potency that an insider can. Perhaps I can appreciate something that they, as insiders, can’t see themselves. That’s my advantage.
SEEDS: In many of the situations in which you have worked, there appears to have been a preexisting arts administrative organizing structure. How does this affect your work?
RICCIO: I have to deal with them too. For example, with the Natal Playhouse and the Sakha National Theatre, this was both good and bad. You have to adapt to what the organizational structure is and identify firmly how you operate, and be well-organized yourself. So, in a way, I become a microcosmic producer within their context, working with them but also have a very specific way of organizing my own project.
The projects I do are invariably organized differently from how they operate. The government-funded Natal Playhouse, for example, works in a very regional theatre sensibility, therefore I have to educate the administrators that we work differently, that creating a Zulu performance is not like doing Winnie the Pooh.
Likewise in Sakha. Tùkak’ not so much because the structure that was already there was compatible. At the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, it was understood that we worked differently. This included our production schedules, how we work with designers, even how we come up with a script or a title for the piece.
Often, I don’t know what I’m going to do till I get there, whether is in Zambia or the Kalahari. This still bothers administrators—they don’t know how to schedule, to budget, or to sell it. I have to be able to indicate to them how best to do that. In Zambia I had to create a structure because there was nothing within their Center for the Arts for us to work within.
We created an ad hoc, one-time only project that has since taken seed. The ideas were presented then are being continued by others. Likewise with the !Xuu and Khwe Bushmen; there was no organizing structure in place for the workshop—no space, no designers, no script, poor transportation, and few translators.
On the first day, seven healers and their assistants agreed to work with me and I knew something special could happen! I have to be a producer as well.
The more specific I am, the better the administration can relate to me. It’s like anything else—when they [an administration] see what you do, and that the project is clearly defined and under control, they tend to allow it to continue, even though they may not agree with what you’re doing.
This is especially true if you are willing to interact with the administration. If you allow for a “synapse” between you and the major organization, they respect you. If you come in wishy-washy and try to fit into their mold, their way of operating, you’re not going to happy and you’re not going to serve the project. For me the organizational structure is just as important as the artistic structure or the cultural context. The organizational structure reflects the culture as well—it evolves from the culture and conditions of the moment. It’s organic.
SEEDS: In terms of contrast, what does indigenous performance offer the Western viewer?
RICCIO: What I try to do is to get people to be more available, as a totality, to a performance, rather than as a thinking viewer. I try to get them to be participants, not to the extent of being pulled onstage, but to be involved physically, emotionally, sensually, and spiritually.
This may be the big difference—to extend the “hallucination” to include the audience. In contrast, the text in a Western show basically engages through the mind, then through the body.
This, in a sense, is the total opposite of indigenous performance. Since we don’t know the language, we have to abandon that method of deciphering the play, because it isn’t offered.
Once you slip into it, it’s the wonderful world we lost, which is primary and innate in all of us. I think the Western world has forgotten this. It implies that we are a part of a vast undifferentiated whole, something that is always transforming, something that is mysterious and can only offer brief glimpses of understanding through indigenous performance explorations.
I have come to know something deep inside that can never be expressed by words. Performance is a revisiting, a reaffirmation of this deep, ephemeral, unknowable knowledge. It feels good and tells me that we are all indigenous to the earth.
excerpt from Trickster By Trade
