The Litooma Story

In 1988 Thomas Riccio, a western trained, experimental theatre artist, began working with Alaska Native people. His experience with the Inupiat and Yup’ik Eskimo and Athabaskan Indians of interior Alaska revealed the unique richness and complexity of indigenous performance expressions.

It also revealed how the worldview and the performance traditions of Alaska Natives, like those of other indigenous groups worldwide are misunderstood and have become marginalized, eroticized, forcibly forbidden, absorbed, and/or threatened with extinction.

The indigenous worldview, mythology, rituals and ceremonies, are, at their core, social-cultural-spiritual-environmental mnemonics, exampling an alternative way of living on and with the earth--they have much to offer the dialog of our emerging global culture.

Riccio's work with Alaska natives evolved into a cross-cultural study and artistic collaboration with indigenous groups worldwide. His field research, workshops, and artistic collaborations are the Litooma Project.

• Performance Anthropology: To identify and document indigenous performance traditions, publishing findings for a larger scholarly and artistic audience.

• Performance Development: To apply indigenous performance traditions, methodologies, and expressions in a contemporary context.

• Performance Evolution: To identify, articulate, and apply indigenous performance perspectives, methods, techniques, and dramaturgy, as a viable alternative to the human-centered, social/cultural remediation focused expressions that dominate contemporary performance.

• Performance Application: To explore practical, meta-theatrical applications of performance and ritual for the twenty-first century. To reimagine, for our historical moment, a place-based, ecologically sensitive, expression that re-calibrates and re-conceptualizes the function, objectives, and methods of performance.

The Litooma Project uses the indigenous worldview and function of performance as a reference and inspiration, namely that humans are only one part of a larger community of place. Being most enabled, humans are responsible for the maintenance and balance of place--place includes humans, animals, elements, climate, ancestors, and the spirits.

The Litooma Project sees the role of humans in contemporary performance similarly, as a facilitator, bringing together the elements of a community of place--the ideas, objects, and histories--to seek balance, reaffirm and adjust the system of place for which they are responsible.

The Litooma Project aspires to enable each person and group with the tools to speak on their own terms, telling their story, maintaining their part of the earth, each in their way.

When people speak, with and of their own unique being and place there will be broad and fundamental implications for the evolving global culture.

Interaction and responsibility to one's place through performance is both ancient and new.

• Performance is a means to better understand, articulate, interact, participate, and celebrate in and with place.

• Performing a place is the recognition and expression of a community that includes humans, animals, the climate, elements, ancestors, and the spirits that inhabit and participate in the creation of a specific place.

• To perform place means to balance, heal, reaffirm, and maintain community.

• Performance of place is pro-active, tactile, primary and integrated code of collective memory and being.

• Performance of place is a way to transcend the ordinary, material, and bodily boundaries in order to assert the universal that transcends all things.

 

Litooma mission statement

indigenous & ritual performance project

Litooma Index