Since 1988 Thomas Riccio, a western trained theatre artist has been working with Alaska Native people. His experience with the Eskimo and Indian people of Alaska brought to his awareness a richness of performance expression going unrecognized and threatened with extinction. Riccio evolved a method and style that realizes performance as a practical tool for people living with their part of the earth. Performance for people indigenous to place is a means to balance, heal, reaffirm, and maintain their community. A community that includes humans, animals, the elements, and the spirits.
Performance is, for indigenous cultures, a primary and integrated holder of collective memory.
Performance is a practical technology to reaffirm, celebrate, and 'balance' a group's existence with its place. Performance is, for indigenous people, a way to transcend the ordinary and material in order to assert the universal that lives within all things. Riccio searches for different ways and means to transplant a peoples traditional performance culture into a modern expression to address existing social, political, and human concerns. The western culture has crushed most of them, extinguishing their ways of expressing themselves and their traditions, forcing them to lose their heritage and unsure about their value in the modern world. Now they are assimilating and their cultures are on the brink of extinction.