A PLAY WITH NO STAGE: AN INTERVIEW WITH DALLAS PLAYWRIGHT THOMAS RICCIO

  *This article was originally published in the local Dallas arts publication THRWD.     

    Thomas Riccio, playwright and co-founder of Dead White Zombies, goes beyond the boundaries of western performance. His work breaks the rules of traditional theater, allowing the viewer to step through the fourth wall at will and be called to join the performance.
    There is no stage at DWZ performances. These site specific plays, which have taken place in a variety of locations around Dallas, including a crack house and a warehouse in North Oak Cliff, create deep, interactive and sensory encounters. The theatre group seeks to magnify this kind of experience in its immersive productions and audience members meander through rooms that act as the set. 
     KaRaoKe MoTel, which ran last fall in Dallas, was the last installment in a trilogy exploring death, the afterlife and rebirth. Riccio’s work parallels his experiences traveling and living abroad. While he’s currently a professor of performance and aesthetic studies at the University of Texas Dallas, his previous research with indigenous groups took him as far as Africa, Asia and Siberia. The customs and rituals he observed in his travels heavily influence his work, which strives to recognize the lines beneath humanity’s surface that connect us all. 

Before coming to Dallas, where did you spend most of your time teaching, researching and directing performances? 

Riccio: I worked in various theatres and schools in Europe, India, Nepal, Korea and throughout Africa and Siberia. Most of my academic career has been at the University Fairbanks Alaska, and here in Dallas at UTD. 

How did you end up helping to found DWZ?

Riccio: I’d been working with Laurie McCarty and Brad Hennigan on several shows with other companies around Dallas. Then we realized it would be better to work on our own. So, we established DWZ in 2011 to create our own style and aesthetic.

Could you speak about the mission behind some of your projects abroad? 

Riccio: I worked on various projects to use performance to educate indigenous groups about various health and political concerns. 

What was your process like when working with these rural, indigenous communities?

Riccio: A lot of it was basically drama therapy. Getting education to communities in rural Africa is very difficult. For instance, I worked with a puppets group in Nairobi to move through various squatter camps. We educated people about STDs, as well as issues of female genital mutilation. These groups aren’t particularly receptive to anyone suggesting how they should, or should not, approach sexual behavior. So we tried to do it in a neutral way.

I’ve been told you have a shaman’s basket that you received during one of your travels. How did you come to acquire it?

Riccio: The shaman’s basket, or medicine basket, was purchased from the son of a recently deceased shaman in the Solu Khumbu region of Nepal. The son had heard I was doing research in shamanism and approached me. He had apprenticed with his father but chose not to carry on his family tradition of shamanism. It is very rare to find a complete medicine basket. It includes special stones, animal parts, such as a stork skull (Janawar ko singh and dara), animals’ horns and teeth for healing, protective amulets and talismans; which were worn during shamanic rituals and never washed as to retain the power of previous healings

As a foreigner, I imagine you experienced a lot of resistance while working in these communities. 

Riccio: I’ve been challenged because I’m white, and they think I have an agenda. Like with Ebola they think that the whites have created it. Just like people here in the states think vaccines are something put in place by a power structure trying to control people. 

In your work abroad you’ve bridged gaps between distinct groups of people living within the same region or nation. How does your work with DWZ here in Dallas resonate with that mission?

Riccio: I’ve covered things that deal with healing rituals, dream and imagination as an investigation of who we are, and where we want to be. Part of the advantage of having worked in so many different cultures is that I see patterns between these groups. In a sense, once you get beyond the specifics and the topicality of a region, culturally and historically, you see that there are still the same recurring biophysical, psychophysical types of patterns. 

So, it’s the line running through all of us that you’re mapping? Through every community and every culture.

Riccio: And through our bodies, recognizing that there are certain things that affect us all in similar ways as humans. A grey sky makes you feel the same way it makes me feel. The coming of winter probably has a similar effect on both of us. So, when we come together for a gathering in the fall or winter for the solstice there is a reason that we are all united biophysically. We are all drawn to it and we’re all going through the same biological and chemical experience.

How did the trilogy of your last three plays frame death, afterlife and rebirth?

Riccio: Flesh World was death, (w)hole was afterlife and KaRaoKe MoTeL is birth or rebirth. Flesh World was based on a funeral ritual that I had seen in south china. In the ritual they unwind the life, and there is a guide that takes them through the unwinding, showing them how to accept the death. In (w)hole you’re introduced to an elusive, dream like reality. In KaRaoKe MoTeL the audience members are treated like strangers who choose how to be reborn. 

How has working with so many different indigenous groups shaped your own spirituality?

Riccio: I’ve evolved my sense that the world is basically my church. Every moment, even this interview, is a spiritual interaction. I don’t make the distinction between spiritual and non-spiritual. So, rather than having a framed event like an hour mass or an hour long service, in a sense I feel we are walking through it all the time. It’s secular, and it’s non-denominational. In my work I’m thinking of what unites us, what’s the energy and the spirit that unites all of us. 

So you’re blurring spirituality and reality?

Riccio: It’s a totality. We call it a blurring, but for me it’s a distinction. Western culture demarcates, categorizes and separates. We’ve enabled ourselves to segment our way of thinking. And basically say well ‘I can create something and not have a consequence to the environment because these things are separate.’ Well I’m saying that NO this [a bottle], this has a life of its own, and I should be aware of what’s going to happen after I’ve used it. That blurring is a return to an older indigenous blurred view, or holistic worldview.

How does the style of an immersive performance, like the DWZ productions, convey that?

 
Riccio: By bringing in an audience, there is a whole-ism in the performance, as well as in the way people move through the play. My idea is that you will see what you need to see. It’s impossible to see the entire performance; it’s like life. You never know what’s going in on the other room. Right now you’re here in front of me but who knows what’s going on in some other part of the world. 

And yet these things are still affecting us.

Riccio: Absolutely, you choose what you need to see or events have chosen what needs to be seen, it’s a dynamic. We kind of think that humanity is generating choice or our perspective, but I think its dialogic. The world is always in dialogue with us. But we don’t listen because we’re only attuned to listening to other humans. We place an animal or plant below ourselves. Now, out of necessity we are realizing that we have to understand that what happens to the bee, or the frog, or the sky is equal to us, and is part of the same dialogue. We’re doing this out of a necessity for survival. But until now, we basically have been denigrating and disenabling the voices of others. 

'Others' being all living things?

Riccio: All living things, and everything in the universe really.

So you’re recognizing the fact that we’re not listening to the voices of others, sentient or non-sentient, until there is a fire blazing or a whole in the ozone layer?

Riccio: Yes, so the question is how do you convey that in art? That’s part of the investigation. It’s exploratory what I’m doing. How do you address it? How do you overcome it? For me it’s about changing perspective, changing how we evaluate and conceptualize reality. 

When you and I go to a traditional performance the illuminated mind is there and we are the passive, sedate viewer. There is a whole mind body split in this western cultural dichotomy in the way we view performance. You can’t have whole-ism if you have a division with this sort of split. So, I try to interrogate that dichotomy, and to open it up so we now see an organism in a totally different way. We see our participation in another way.

What do you have in store for the future?

Riccio: I’ll do a show at UTD with the students, an adaptation of The Dream Play later this semester. The next DWZ show will be in the fall and will be a zombie show, which I’m working on now and that will be an immersion of course, and it will be something unlike anything I’ve done before. It’s still in a germination stage so I can’t really put my thoughts about it into words.