Alaska Native Performance
Toksook Bay, Alaska
Riccio’s only objective was to find a way for traditional performance to once again breathe with contemporary viability, enabling it to speak the ways of the ancestors as it addressed the issues of today. This freedom of expression privileged and empowered the participants and facilitated the re-imagining of an Alaska native past as it contributed to the imagining of its future.
—George Charles, Yup’ik Elder. Alaska Native Studies ,University of Alaska Fairbanks
Archival
You could call Thomas Riccio a citizen of the world. But his world is the little-known world of indigenous peoples, pushed aside by industrialization, and his language is the theater, whether he is in the Kalahari Desert, Siberia, or back home in Alaska.
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Yup’ik Shaman
Kiviq, Eagle-Wolf Messenger Feast , circa 1890s
Yup'ik and Inupiat Traditional Masks
Puffin Beak gloves, used in Kiviq ritual
Inupiat grave masks
Contemporary
Inupiiq Kiviq, 2017, Barrow, Alaska (photos: Bill Hess)
The theatre of the Alaskan Eskimo was a theatre of visions and myths, and functioned in a time when the world was a shroud of mystery filled with spirits. It was a theatre tradition that originated in the time before time. It was a time when humans could easily transform into animals and animals into humans. When myths were formulating the earth's shape and its ways. A millennium before Aristotle's Poetics, this was a theatre of the earth.
from: Traditional Alaskan Eskimo Theatre: Performing the Spirits of the Earth
