top: CHAPS, Health Awareness Puppets, Nairobi, Kenya
bottom: Imipashi, Luska, Zambia
Theatre director and professor Thomas Riccio has made theatre with the Eskimos in Alaska, the Bushmen of the Kalahari, blacks and whites in the new South Africa, and with the Siberian people, assisting them in the development towards democracy and self-awareness in the former Soviet Union.
Amongst the Bushmen in the Kalahari several of his performers were traditional healers and the daily work mirrored the night’s ceremonies. Members of the Zambian group came from many different tribes in a country where there is much tribal friction.
A constant in his work is, however, bringing up the memory and knowledge of what has been forgotten. To bridge the gap between the modern and the traditional, which would give indigenous people a way of relating to the modern world on their terms.
Dagens Nyheter (Daily News), Stockholm
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Our earth and its inhabitants are moving, in fits and starts, challenging long established ways of being in the world, into an era that will require a fundamental personal, social, and cultural re-evaluation of who and what we are, how we relate to one another, our self and our planet.
A new sort of consciousness is emerging that is responding, wittingly or not, on the place-based systems that have much in common with indigenous cultures.
Whether this consciousness is motivated by the necessity of political, environmental, or economic survival, or symptomatic of a larger historical evolution or cycle, is of no consequence.
Our sense of self, identity, and connections with others, the environment, animals, and spirit is undergoing a reformulation that is shaping a participatory reality sensitized to inter-dependence and holism.
All of the humanity’s wisdom and abilities are being called to task in this process, including, in no small way, performance.
Is it any wonder that the world has become awash with performance expressions?
Along with the abundance of dance, music, and theatre offerings why has there has been an explosion of cable offerings, films, and video games? All are, in some way or form, underlying attempting to explain, mark, reassure, comfort, and/or prepare for global transformation in which we are all a part.
In this era of profound upheaval and challenges (e.g. the political and economic turmoil and the technologization and virtualization of reality), performance, the most fundamental personal, social, and cultural expression, has taken on a heightened significance.
In a time of fundamental change a fundamental and grounding resource is being called upon. At its most basic, performance, in any and all of it diverse manifestations, gives form to feeling through a system of signs and codes in a effort to make visible the invisible that exist within and now swirling around and among us.
Is it any wonder, with more going within individuals, in the world, and given a re-conceptualization of the world, self, societies, culture’s and reality, performance is playing a central role as medium, mnemonic and catalyst of change.
Faced with unprecedented change humanity is accessing and re-examining all of its historical and cultural resources (much of which were formerly marginalized or misunderstood); among them ritual, shamanism, traditional healing, and indigenous performance.
Appropriately, all of which are interrelated and focused on harmonizing the material and spiritual as it seeks to maintain balance. Performance is a participant in recreating our world and it is also a forum to which look to understand the new indigenous place that is evolving within and around us.
We are all becoming earthlings, and with that we become more a knowing part of a whole that now needs to be called in existence.