Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 220: Nasty Performances — with Ryan Tacata
Speakers: Samantha Walters, Am Johal, Ryan Tacata
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Samantha Walters 0:04
Hello listeners! I’m Sam with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of Below the Radar, our host, Am Johal, is joined by Ryan Tacata. Ryan is an Assistant Professor of Performance at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts. Together, Am and Ryan discuss his performance residency at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, and designing pedagogy for contemporary performance education. We hope you enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:39
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We have a special guest with us today, Ryan Tacata. Welcome, Ryan.
Ryan Tacata 0:48
Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Am Johal 0:50
Ryan, I'm wondering if we can start with you introducing yourself.
Ryan Tacata 0:54
I'm Ryan Tacata. I'm a performance maker, and currently assistant professor of theatre and performance at the School for the Contemporary Arts.
Am Johal 1:04
Well, right, I thought maybe we could just start with, since I just saw a performance that you're involved with, on Friday night at Emily Carr at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, and you were in residency there—and I've seen you naked, I feel like I'm ready to interview you. I feel like I seen a bit of you, a little bit of a sense. But if you could maybe describe this residency at the Libby Leshgold Gallery and the performance on Friday, which was lovely.
Ryan Tacata 1:33
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Yeah, so let's see, in December, of this past year, Vanessa Kwan, who just became the director of galleries and exhibition space and whatnot at Emily Carr asked if I would come in with, alongside Justine Chambers, Justine A. Chambers, and loscil, to do mini-residencies at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, as, one, as a way for Vanessa to figure out what could happen in that space, to test new kinds of events and exhibition formats. And also just give us some space to try things out that maybe we've never tried out before.
So, yeah, we were each in for about two weeks. And my two weeks just wrapped up yesterday. And so when Vanessa was asking, like, you know, what, what are some things that we could do here, there were so many bad ideas, like really bad ideas. Like, one fantasy I had was just one live hose going off in the gallery for two weeks, just because it's such an upsetting thing to have a live hose on. It's like water waste and it's unruly and it's wet, and we shouldn't have so much water inside of a gallery. And they were like, “No,” you know that, “I don't know, we don't know if that's going to be possible.” Some other ideas were like just a hot air balloon. Such a tall space, there's so much volume in that space just to have a hot air balloon that would give people like a one inch ride, and then fall back down. I thought it'd be really fun. A food court at one point.
But we landed on installing this 400 square foot white, high pile carpet in the gallery. And the idea was that over the two weeks, we would program a series of activations on this carpet that were really different in mode and form. One was, you know, a screening of Gregg Araki, Nowhere, from The Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, which is one of my most favorite movies for no other reason. And it was just one of my most favorite movies. And we ate like piles of cheesies on the carpet. And they're free and it was a free movie night and people could wipe their hands and sort of this gross suburban basement kind of experience or image. And then you know, that would be done. And what would remain were the cheesy stains on the white carpet. So then in the between times at these events, you would see these traces and impressions from stuff that happened prior.
Other things included, like some therapy dogs from the Wellness Center at Emily Carr where people can come and just sort of casually play and pet with dogs. And so like, it's always so fun to work with animals because they, they draw so much attention. They're so like, it's not hard to understand what's going on because you're like, "Oh, it's a dog. And I can pet it and it will bring me joy." It's my favorite kinds of performance. James Long, who you know, is a theater director here in Vancouver, Theater Replacement, wrestled his children for about an hour on the carpet, which is really cool.
Am Johal 4:45
I wasn't able to go but I heard about it. Legendary.
Ryan Tacata 4:49
It was really good. It was really, it was so bizarre. There are so many different performances where something private is now being exposed publicly, right, like a personal story or experience or something. But here the public exposure of like an internal family dynamic, not being like re-presented but presented raw through the frame of wrestling was so exciting because he saw all these sort of micro negotiations of like internal family dynamics, even if I don't totally know what's going on. You can kind of see them play out in facial expressions and when something turns from like a tender moment until it's something a little bit more violent and aggressive that James would have to come and break open you know, or silliness all within seconds, it's so satisfying to watch unfold. That was a really fun and dynamic event. I don't think I've smiled so much in my entire life, my cheeks were raw.
Am Johal 5:54
And in terms of the performance on Friday, if you could speak a little bit to that.
Ryan Tacata 5:49
Yeah, so then one of the other activations was Curtain Speech. And the idea was that it was an hour long content warning. And so I've been writing this long content warning, kind for an imagined performance, but not even related. All the things either I have heard in content warnings before, or things that would never be in content warnings. I've been writing that for the past couple of weeks, you know, at the bus stop, or on the toilet, or whatever. So I'm writing this very long list. And then we read that list. And it was me and Justine Chambers and Billy Marchenski. And as we read the list, we enacted certain items from that list on, on the carpet.
Am Johal 6:38
It was a really intense performance. There was lots of nudity. There was making out. It had like all of the pieces, but it seemed very, for a Vancouver audience in terms of happening in a gallery, it seemed quite new to the scene here, in a way. It certainly has historical precedents in terms of performance art, probably in the 70s, in the 80s more so in Vancouver. But yeah, I'm wondering what you were, the material that you were playing with, the concept.
Ryan Tacata 7:08
Yeah, and I want to hear more about that. Actually, I want to hear more about your experience.
(laughs)
You know, I came to Vancouver, two and a half years ago now. In the first year and half of that was during the early days of the pandemic. So I feel like I'm learning a lot about Vancouver and what the live art scene looks like here, the theatre scene, the dance scene. I'm meeting a bunch of people, seeing a bunch of work. And also just like digging into this history, so I feel like yeah, I'm very much in the getting to know you, learning kind of experience. A lot of my experience of Vancouver takes place at the School for the Contemporary Arts in this Theater and Performance Program. And so I'm learning a lot from the students and from the faculty that are there, around what kind of work folk are interested in, what they see, what feels new, what feels maybe a bit risky.
But I think in terms of content warnings, you know, working at an institution, it's a really particular context. It's an educational institution. And there's like a kind of a huge emphasis on student safety, and making sure that people are physically and psychologically and emotionally taking care, which is good. And it's also a place where we are asking folks to experiment, and to take risks, and to take us into the unknown, and to try things out that might feel a little dangerous, or messy, or complicated, or difficult. And I find that to be one of the hardest bits in my job, of trying to really foster that kind of attitude or spirit. That space for experimentation. And, at the same time, work within an institution that is actively trying to safeguard in advance.
And so how that manifests in terms of content mornings is, you know, especially around audience services, you know, I'll be working with students for a couple of semesters on whatever it is that they're working through and encouraging them and challenging them and, and then, when other folks come in and watch it for the first time, there's this sense of shock of like, oh, there's no way that we can use flour, there's no way that their tits can be out, there's no way that they can pee in the, there's no—you know, it’s like this immediate kind of knee jerk reaction towards things that I think are at surface level shocking. And then come out—the content—the proposed content warnings and there have been some that are so wild, like, one more recently was fresh flowers, as a content warning, and it's those moments that causes me to pause and think like, “Well, how did we get here? And what is—well, what are we trying to warn and alarm people about in this work?” And some of the things I totally understand, like flashing lights, it's, you know, if you have epilepsy, that's a dangerous thing, or if there are, I don't know, things that are—now if you're doing a peanut performance, and you're spraying peanut oil everywhere, and you're like deadly allergic to peanuts, I feel like that's a good thing to know about.
But, for example, something like nudity, in the context of contemporary art, is really wild, when you think about the long history of representations of the nude body in—from antiquity to the contemporary. What is it to warn people about nudity, and knowing that we're all very nude all the time? So it's, it starts to mean, you start to pull that thread a little bit there. We start to ask, “Oh, well, who are we warning? And what are we warning them about? Is it in the name of family values? In the name of certain morals? The name of the conservative ideologies? Is it …” and then, you know, and I don't, yeah, I don't know.
Am Johal 11:11
Yeah, and I guess in the institutional context, that, you know, academic freedom, artistic risk taking, when it meets the kind of desires or demands on the institution for the wellness of students, you know, who draws the line of where that is, and it seems to be murky, so these flashpoints always emerge, and when it gets distorted through conservative policies, where you see, you know, happening in certain states in the US—drag queens reading to children—you know, all of these, it gets into a potent mix, where it actually places professors in an awkward position as well, because you don't know that line, and it gets drawn arbitrarily all the time.
Ryan Tacata 11:59
Yeah. Yeah, it's really tricky and it's, you know, the, especially the, I would say, the archive of work that I'm bringing to the university, there's a lot of bizarre work. I'm really drawn, as an artist and as an educator, to works that are hard to place, you know, things that aren't necessarily given, like, their value isn't because they were the most, you know, brilliant or groundbreaking, or well tracked, you know, works of theatre. They're often really bizarre and strange moments that took place and hold—you know warehouses or were barely documented, maybe they only exist in gossip or something. And some of the work is explicitly, you know, sexual and is challenging and difficult. And I want to be able to incorporate that into my own pedagogy. And I do.
Like I would, I'd be a liar if I said there wasn’t a little bit of anxiety every time that I gave a lecture or tried to give some context around why we're working with this particular form, and who are some of the artists historically that have navigated that, but then I look at some of the bodies that were experimenting with those, and it's often women, queer folk, and people of color. And that's exciting to me, to say, like, hey, here are some people that have been working through really complicated issues of identity, of experiences of oppression or violence in their lives through these new and emergent forms, and let's learn from them. And to sort of censor those in advance or give a kind of preamble of like, hey, you should all be nervous before you watch this or look at this, or be concerned, be anxious, be careful before you experience this work. It feels strange versus letting the work produce those kinds of difficult thoughts and feelings and then unpack them with folk. That's the kind of, feels kind of like a bit of a dance.
Am Johal 14:10
So Ryan, before you became a professor here at SFU in the School for Contemporary Art, how did you get into performance in art making in the first place? Were you just doing this since you were a child or how did you fall upon it?
Ryan Tacata 14:25
Well, listen before we move there, I wanted to hear more about your experience of, of the curtain speech.
Am Johal 14:31
It was, I think for me, the concept drew me in, first of all, so before I even walked in the door, the fact that you're playing with that material, I think is really timely and interesting. Also, you know, haven't seen that much performance art in Vancouver and maybe I just wasn't going to the right places. So it's great to see that in the gallery at Emily Carr. And then of course, I knew two of the three of you already. So that like that was also like a sense of warmth to coming into the space. And then in terms of the actual, like, it was intimate. I trusted you already coming in. And in the parts that would make an audience perhaps, you know, wiggle in their seats or something like this, I was drawn into why you were doing the work. And in that sense, I was like, you could, I could tell you were enjoying performing it. And that gave me a sense of joy, like even the moments that were maybe intentionally meant to draw—or to make an audience uncomfortable, to me, it was like I wanted to go with wherever you were going. And I like that it was poking at little bears and little things that I think are really important in terms of the risk taking that art requires, but you know, somebody else who was there as well, is somebody who's sitting with us right now, I'm gonna bring her into the conversation to see what she might have to it. Sam?
Sam Walters 16:03
Hello.
(laughs)
Ryan Tacata 16:06
What was your experience? You were there. What was your experience?
Sam Walters 16:08
Hi, there. This is Sam, just jumping in here. I work here at SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement as the Program Assistant and I'm also an interdisciplinary performance artist here in Vancouver.
Yeah, I think it was really exciting for me to see this outside of school. And I mean, I've been in rehearsal space with you before. So a lot of this I was like, oh, yeah, Ryan would do that. But yeah, I agree. It was really fun, I think was my main takeaway of just that I was enjoying it. I think it was really, because there's a little bit of that shock value that I think you're playing intentionally into which I think in school, sometimes we're trying to not do that, because then it's like, well, that's cheap, but then also makes you think about the content warnings in way, as well like producing this shock as well. I am still thinking about the butt stains on the carpet. That was really fun.
Ryan Tacata 16:59
Can you explain that part? Can you explain that part for the listeners?
Sam Walters 17:03
For the listeners at home, in case you missed it, was, Ryan, you were, yeah, you were completely naked at that point and you had chocolate pudding? It was chocolate pudding, sort of between your butt cheeks, and scooting like a, like a dog on the carpet. It reminded me—I saw this performance in Germany this summer by Florentine Holzinger. And there was a moment where like, four dancers like pooped on stage, but it wasn't like poop, but it was like something that—it was coming out of their butt and so I think about that a lot, of like the process of, and the intentional practice of getting something up your butt for a performance as well. That's my review. Thanks Am.
(laughs)
Ryan Tacata 17:44
Thanks Am.
Am Johal 17:45
I was gonna say also, in as it increasingly added to the dimension, particularly the scooting part is that when you see performers take the work there, it feels liberatory for an audience, because it's like, we're all constrained, living within institutional parts. So when you see that being done, it feels like this thing is lifted, it's almost like a sigh of relief, because it feels like you're given permission to do something similar. And I think that art-making in that, in that zone, does that for an audience.
Ryan Tacata 18:19
Yeah. Yeah, I feel like, I feel like, you know, the work that I'm typically drawn to is really boring in terms of what I make, like I am boring in the sense that I'm interested in long periods of time, I'm interested in giving folk a lot of space and time for associations to come up, to sit with stillness, to sit with really like tight images that are like, obsessed over and like, perfectly executed.
And I think that something I've been craving, as an artist, at least within this, during this residency, was the permission to be a little nasty and to be a little perverted and to be juvenile and to get into these kinds of acts that are, that are silly and ridiculous. And pair this with things that you know—and shape them in such a way that maybe they can be held as more heightened aesthetic experiences or something. but to have that twinning, I think was really necessary for me. Probably coming out of the pandemic, probably being here in Vancouver where everyone is so nice. And everything is so nice and careful…
Am Johal 19:25
And really repressed.
Ryan Tacata 19:27
And really repressed maybe, I don't know, I can't make that judgment yet. I don't know. But I—that's what I've heard, but just to, just to create these kinds of openings. Yeah, this idea of like giving permission, I feel like I need to do that with myself. I feel like I need to do that with my students. I feel like I need to do that with my colleagues. And I think that's one of the sort of impulses I have as a queer person in the world is just to make experiences and moments in environments just a little more queer or wild or nasty or perverted without only living in that terrain, like collapsing them back into something much more serious like this podcast, maybe, you know, a discursive conversation or God knows what, but I like giving myself that permission to yeah to carve to carve out these more ridiculous spaces for things to happen.
Am Johal 20:23
So now we're gonna come back to this question of how did you get into making art and performance? Were you doing it since you were a kid, I assume?
Ryan Tacata 20:31
No, not at all—I mean, in my—like, I grew up in Fresno, California, which is like a Central Valley, California farming city. And actually, I grew up in a suburb of that place called Clovis, California, which is known for its rodeo days and other white cowboy things, you know. Knd of really terrifying place to grow up but I would play a lot on the couch with like my X-Men action figures because I'm a little bit of a dork and kind of lonely, I’m sure. But you like you have to find ways of playing like, garbage days where my favorite, like going when people would dump all their garbage onto the street and then you could pull out different toys and stuff—like toys being like a bumper or like, you know, a refrigerator door or something that became like a shield and your sword, you know.
Like, those kinds of performances I was doing when I was little. And then high school, I got dragged into theater on accident. And my drama teacher was really, I think he was a little drunk all the time, like he was driving around in his car in the parking lot, sort of drinking and smoking. And he'd come in like red face, but he's so passionate and so like lovely. And he was really taken by me for some reason, and then ended up giving me my own show, called The Ryan Tacata Show where I was able to direct a bunch of bits, and then put it on this, like, dinner theater kind of thing. And I remember our principal at the time, he like rolled in on his wheelchair and was like, you know, Ryan, like, I feel like I could get fired for a lot of the things that just took place here. Because I really had all the freedom to, to kind of stage whatever, like there was, in The Ryan Tacata Show, there was the gay fashion designer for the pope who came in and was describing the next season as like a kind of talk show format, and just some other really stupid, poor 16 year old’s thoughts playing out on stage for a bunch of people.
But, I would say yeah, then I ended up—I didn't know what to do with my life. I like, I thought maybe I could be an actor. So I went to Fresno State in California. This is a state school system. I got a scholarship to do acting there and it was horrible. It was very boring. It was very boring to take the acting classes and whatnot. And I was state—I was cast as like this boy in a Noël Coward play called Hay Fever. Which, why they were doing Noël Coward's Hay Fever in like the early 21st century in Fresno, California made no sense to me whatsoever, but I was in it. I was wearing a top hat and eating pudding. And I was like, I don't…
Am Johal 23:27
That's where the pudding came from.
(laughs)
Ryan Tacata 23:28
The pudding probably came back from…
(laughs)
That's tapioca pudding, and they're supposed to like gross people out. I don't know. But anyway, the review from that—in like the school newspaper was that I had played the character too gay and this was like sort of circulated. You know why it was Ryan camping up this character. And I really wasn't, it wasn't, that wasn't—well I didn't think I was, that wasn't my intention. And then I had to go around the classrooms and talk to people about it, and so forth. And you know, what does it mean to be too gay and X,Y, and Z, and I was like, I need to get out of this place.
And at the same time, I was doing my own things. I didn't even know it had a history or legacy. I was just being weird. Like I—there was a tea shop in Fresno that I brought a mirror out to and I stood in front of it for 24 hours, with a sign over it that said, “What am I?” It's so bad. It's so cheesy, but like it just—it's kind of like, existential experiment I was having with myself and I wrote a play just for shopping carts, for example. So it was like an object base kind of performance. But I thought, oh, wouldn't it be lovely if all the shopping carts that you saw sort of strewn about in parking lots and in canals and wherever had a story tied to them? So it was this sort of play for and about shopping carts.
Eventually, I was on this, this children's theater tour and the director, she was so wonderful. She was like, “Listen, you need to get out of here.” I was like, “Okay, like, where should I go?” And she was like, “You should think about this performance program at the School for the Art Institute of Chicago. It feels like it's a place that would really support some of the ideas and work that you're making.” And I didn't even think I was making work, I was just doing stuff. And then, yeah, I got in and I got a scholarship for my portfolio, which also included, like, window dressings at this vintage store that I was working at, that were, they were not—they were more like installations than they were like window dressings.
Everything kind of changed from there, I like—I started to learn a lot more about the histories of experimental performance, and theater and performance art and live art and all the things that sort of fall under that banner and met a bunch of rad people. And yeah, it changed my life, it changed the way that I think about the everyday, it changed the way I think about art and what performance is and can be. And I mean, you name it. So yeah, I think those are some beginnings.
Am Johal 26:02
And you later on did your PhD at Stanford? Yeah. So what was the subject of your work there?
Ryan Tacata 26:11
So the dissertation was on an alternative art space in San Francisco, called La Mamelle. In Vancouver, it was associated with Western Front, sort of within that network of alternative art spaces. And from—they were operating from the 70s to the 90s. And in San Francisco was a place to go and see these emergent forms. You know, and it's funny, because we talked about performance art and at that time, that wasn't really a term to use, that's more of a historical term that we've come to. It's kind of sad sometimes, because it sort of flattens out a lot of specificity of how these things sort of emerged in various contexts from, you know, music venues or galleries or warehouses or even off the stage, et cetera, et cetera. But it was a time when there really wasn't a term like that. And so it was a space where people, if you could put your mind into it, were just really experimenting with different uses of time, and space, and body and text and objects and so forth, and La Mamelle was also an early venue for video art, which has a lot of performance dimensions in it, and other just modes of distributing like these experimental kinds of forms.
And so anyways, they were operative until the 90s. And then they closed down and had to get rid of their archive. And there was this big drama around what to do with all of the stuff that they had collected. And a portion of it ended up at Stanford, another portion ended up at the Berkeley Art Museum. And so the dissertation itself was was trying to think through this archive of performance and the relationship between performance and archives and also historicize La Mamelle a little bit and thinking about how performance might be able to be distributed beyond this framing of of the live event, so performance in print or performance on video, or recorded performances, and all the different kinds of experiments with that.
Am Johal 28:13
That's super interesting, just with the connection to Western Front and look at some of the older organizations like Video In Video Out that goes out to the early 70s. And as well, you know, grappling with their own systems of archives and digitizing them and historicizing them as well. Wondering, now, you know, coming into SFU into a theater and performance program where a number of you are new faculty in the area, how you're thinking through pedagogically, you know, where to take the school. You walk into history immediately when you walk into a school, but you're also, a number of you are quite new. You've been on faculty three or four years. I’m thinking about Erika Latta, who has been a guest on our show, James Long, is new to faculty. And so it must be a really exciting time to be in the program and to think anew what theatre and performance can be in this time, and particularly with the histories that SFU has.
Ryan Tacata 29:10
Yeah, it's a really exciting time. I—you know, when I—let me, let me say this, is that I was looking for—the dream job was to teach performance in an art school context. And that's really different than teaching, let's say theater or drama or acting within a theater program, maybe housed within the humanities. And partly that was based on my experience of being at the school for the Art Institute of Chicago, and being so just taken aback by what the faculty in that performance program were teaching and how they were teaching and how it was connecting to my experiences of taking classes in film and sound and fiber arts and all other kinds of really rich programs with that you get within an art school. And I was like, oh, that's, that's where I'd like to teach. That's where I'd like to, yeah, try out different forms of studio practice and so forth.
And so when this position opened up, it was really exciting because it's quite rare to see an opening for a performance position, a tenure track professorship for performance within an art school. And so I applied and, and when I got here it was, you know, the top of the pandemic. Just very strange time, you know, the schools were shut down, all the teaching went online. So one, it was about trying to figure out how to continue to teach performance practice via Zoom, at the same time, the faculty that were there, Steven Hill and Cole Lewis, who brought us in, left for a couple of different reasons. And so there's just a sort of clearing of this new home. And—which was a bit terrifying to have to orient myself to a new institution and to a new city and to a new faculty, and a new student body, that maybe there were expectations of what their degree was supposed to be, what kind of education they were supposed to be getting. And I was certainly brought in as somebody who was going to teach from, you know, my field of scholarly expertise and artistic practice.
And so I could teach that but you know, I couldn't, and I won't teach other kinds of acting forms, for example, just not, it's not—I'd be the worst person to teach that. And so it took us some time to have to think through like, well, what did we do? We know that we're gonna have to fill some new positions, we know that we're gonna have to readdress the curriculum now that all the old faculty are gone. And we spent the past couple of years doing a bit of review and redesign of the curriculum. Right now all those program modifications are sitting with the ministry, they're being reviewed and hopefully this will go through at the top of June. So we have a whole new program coming in. We've, and we spent, yeah, a lot of a lot of time thinking through structures and course containers that could open us up to a number of modes of performance, of contemporary performance. That's quite exciting. It's like, it's a pretty rare opportunity. And there's a lot of support from the School for the Contemporary Arts and faculty. And I think the students are slowly getting on board with where we might be taking them.
But there are a lot of unknowns. And I really like that space. Like I rarely teach the same thing twice. I really love thinking of the classroom as performance, and thinking of these new events that we might be able to create where we confront a set of ideas or art practices or techniques or modes together, kind of for the first time, you know. Like I just invented this course around persona making, where we had students invent their own personas and craft their own personas, art personas, over the course of a semester, and I've never taught that before. And what does that look like in terms of a studio? How do you test that out? How do you grade that? What are the artists that you bring in to kind of shape the context for that work? And you know, what, what might that give students in terms of a sense of—give them in terms of a sense of, you know, how they might be able to use some of these tools or practices in their own work moving forward, what might it inspire, and so forth. And so I like giving us a space for that kind of invention, and that we can continually update the program as the years roll on. And we're responding to the fields and to contemporary culture, and the particular students that are in our program, and so forth. That's quite exciting.
But let me say this, is that the big thrust is that we're really interested in performance makers versus training people as actors, or as directors or as dramaturgs, within any particular set of skill sets or a particular discipline. And part of that is to, to give students enough agency to see themselves as artists. And to say like, the things I'm trying out are specific to me and to the way that I'm kind of experiencing the world. And I also can invent methods and methodologies, and I can articulate them, and I can test them out. And I can come up with forms of assessment for them. To say, like, “Oh, here's what good or bad might be for me,” versus that coming from the outside. And in doing so learn to professionalize from within, that they can start to sort of profess the things that they really care about, versus having this abstract sense that there is like a way to leave the school and then survive, because there's just not. There's many ways and a lot of ways that we've all discovered in our own wayward forms. Like I don't know if you've exactly planned and plotted your way to this exact moment.
Am Johal 34:41
Absolutely not. I was a community organizer and I guess I just learned how to do—I think of this as community organizing in a new way. And interestingly, I was always kind of at the intersection of the political, and art was a way of getting away from the intensity of the political. And so it was something that I'd always could have been involved with—communities or sat on boards and this type of thing. But inhabiting this position was that they didn't need to be like a false wall between these things, they could actually, like, come together, and you could just totally be yourself. And, so, in some sense, I just did things I was interested in and then happened upon here, whether it was enough agency and autonomy to kind of create a kind of, your own work in the way that you want to.
Ryan Tacata 35:27
Yeah, and find it and discover it, you know, and fill it out. And I feel like that's gonna be a life time experience for all of us in a lot of ways, or at least it is for me, and so to really honor that, and not shy away from that, I think takes a lot of, takes a big investment and curiosity, just to get folk really curious about things that maybe they don't know, or haven't experienced yet. And then also just a kind of confidence in experiencing the unknown and the new. And that it's okay not to know, it's okay not to have a complete understanding of how things are or what they are. But to be able to sit with things long enough to go like, “Oh, this is exciting, or this is going to feed me or this is an interesting set of ideas that I'm gonna pursue for a little bit and, and stay with for a while and see what might come up.” Yeah, trying to cultivate that sense of, of the unknown.
Which is tricky, because you're also competing with certain demands of job markets and expectations of what to do with, you know, a BFA or a degree that I go out and get a job and, you know, financial insecurity, all of it, and the questions of like, what am I going to do with my life and so forth. It's like, all that's very much operative. So I'm trying to attend to that as well. But also maintain this sense of, hey, it's gonna—I want you to feel smart enough and creative enough and bold enough to like, discover that down the line, and then invite other people into that world, to become world makers. Not just for yourself, but for your community of friends and artists and activists, and you name it. So trying to model, yeah, trying to model a program that will produce that within the students so that they can produce that for themselves and others.
Am Johal 37:14
I was gonna ask you about artists and performers that you're inspired or influenced by who are working currently, whether they're professors or peers or others, but wondering who you think is doing interesting work that you're particularly attuned to or interested in?
Ryan Tacata 37:31
Oh my gosh, I mean, so many people. The people that come to mind include Miguel Gutierrez, La Chica Boom, Adam Linder, 600 HIGHWAYMEN, Every house has a door, Bread Face blog, you know, like I’m just going to throw that in. It's like this person who anonymously was smashing her face into bread on Instagram and Tiktok, you know, for a long time and has hundreds of thousands of followers and has made a really wonderful career for herself, just pressing her face into bread. I'm really happy, yeah. Julie Tolentino, and older folk too that are still making work, like Lois Weaver, and Curious and Forced Entertainment. And I see a lot of work from dance to drag to performance art to, dare I say theater. Yeah, there's like, there's a bunch of folks that I'm inspired by. Yeah.
Am Johal 38:36
I was gonna ask you about, you know, one of the challenges of coming into a faculty position, you know, you can generate a lot of energy and ideas, being in a, in a pedagogical space, being around other colleagues. But also, I find when I teach, I learn a lot from students as well. But this challenge of having the time to make your own work, and I'm wondering how that has been for you in terms of—while you've been a new faculty member, arriving into a new country, new city, all those things, and at the same time, being able to produce your own and make your own work and having the time for it.
Ryan Tacata 39:13
Yeah, it's hard. It's a, it's like a work life balance thing because I also have, I'm in a relationship with my partner, Kyle DeMedio, who I love and we have a dog named Jasper, he's a miniature wiener dog. And I have friends, you know, and family and I guess I should have hobbies or like a personal life or something. But trying to manage all of that is a little tricky. And I think the—again, this is why I was really interested in teaching within an art school context, was so that I didn't feel like I had to, like separate my teaching from my practice and or my scholarly work from my teaching, etc, etc. So I feel like for me, the long game is to really look at all of that as a singular project and to not feel like I'm necessarily separating out those spaces. And I appreciate it when things feel a little blurry. Like when it feels like the classroom context is becoming kind of like a performance of an event or if there's something kind of pedagogical in what I'm doing alongside a project, like where I'm able to teach a workshop, or give a talk or something, like when those things sort of sort of feel like they're all somehow operative, and that the context might be shifting a little bit, that feels really great.
But just in terms of time management, you know, we get a, we get a bit of a research summer, it's so great about teaching in Canada, like we end in April and start in September. So that's like a pretty good chunk of time. We've been bogged down with a lot of administrative work just because we're a small faculty and so we have to do a lot of admin ourselves. I've been the area coordinator for our program for the past couple of years and ushering a lot of these program changes and bringing on new faculty and doing job searches, and etc, etc.
But I think, you know, I also have a performance company in San Francisco called For You, that has been really wonderful in allowing me to like work from Vancouver, even though a lot of our work is sort of based in the Bay. Practically speaking, we do a lot of Zoom meetings, and I do a lot of prep in advance, like meeting with community members, or doing some writing or, you know, whatever we can do before we get together in a studio and then pop over to the Bay and do the sort of residencies and work really fast and quick and throw things up and working within the parameters and the conditions that I have available.
You know, so it's, I have two weeks at the Libby and we'll do two weeks of work there. And it'll look just like this and take those into consideration in terms of how the work emerges. Of course, I would love more time just to make my own performances and that I feel like I have a lot of time to do that. I don't know, we all have to do that kind of juggling.
Am Johal 41:48
What—do you have any work that you're developing right now that you wanted to talk about?
Ryan Tacata 41:53
With For You, you know, we spent the past couple of years doing this project called Artists and Elders that started right at the top of the pandemic. We had this grant to work with folk who have dementia and their care partners. This is before the shelter in place ordinances and so forth. Let me back up. So the company For You is, it's me and my collaborator, Erika Chong Shuch, who's a choreographer and a director, and Rowena Richie, who's a dancer and brain health researcher, and we make—we founded this group in 2015, and we make performances as gifts, and we think about the work as living somewhere between performance and social practice.
And so the way that we work is that we get to know people for a long period of time, and then we make aesthetic experiences that reflect that—our getting to know them. So in other worlds it might be understood as like ethnography, or something, or creative ethnography, but we date people, take a bunch of notes, and then go back to the studio and craft experiences that are largely just for them, which is complicated in terms of questions of audience, because the impulse is often like, you know, fill all the seats. If this is a good performance, then what thousands and thousands of people have come to see it and we've made all this money. But the way that we work, like we've shifted our, yeah, our sense of audience impact around depth of engagement with the individuals that we're working with, and how do we measure success based off of that?
Okay, so on top of the pandemic of folk with dementia, their care partners, and we were going to think about caregiver burden, and to create experiences that might help ease or relieve a bit of caregiver burden from folk that are taking care of their loved ones. But then we couldn't, we couldn't go into nursing homes and hospitals and so forth because of the ordinances. So then we just took that money and we started to organize these pairings, these couplings of artists and elders, in the broadest sense of both of those words, just to have a little bit of exchange virtually when people are sort of working over Zoom and so forth. And we paired like a hundred people to do that kind of work early on, and then did that work in Chicago and at the Court Theatre in Chicago with Hyde Park Art Center and then also the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, more recently worked with an elder for about a year.
But now on on the end of it, we're doing a project called The Welcoming which is working with this befriending organization, an elder befriending organization called LBFE, Little Brother - Friends of the Elderly in San Francisco, and they work with people who are clinically diagnosed as being as living with loneliness, and being socially isolated, meaning that they don't get more than two social visits a month, and that includes social workers and so forth. So folk that are like really, really isolated, even before the pandemic for a number of reasons. We're working with a group of elders that they serve with our artists in thinking about how they welcome us into their own stories and imaginations and homes and so forth. How can we listen for the kinds of welcoming from folk who are historically very isolated, who maybe have a lot to say around what the impact of hospitality might be—or a greeting or a warm hello. So working with a group of artists that are sort of our delegate artists to go out and work with those elders and then shaping that into performance exhibition. So we have another R&D, work in progress kind of thing this June, partly at the Headlands Center for the Arts and then the other venue to sort of showcase this sort of performance exhibition is TBD. At the moment.
Am Johal 45:27
Nice. Yeah. You know, with Below the Radar, it's a great public opportunity to shit talk your colleagues if you want to. I was wondering if you had anything you wanted to share or say to Erika Latta and James Long.
Ryan Tacata 45:41
Wow…
Am Johal 45:41
A joust. Public joust. Prodding.
(laughs)
Ryan Tacata 45:49
I, to shit talk my colleagues. Wow. No, I Okay. Let me say this, I have to say that I feel really blessed being able to work with the two of them. And I’m, it’s—James is great. You know, he came in—I mean, it was just Erika and I trying to keep it an area together, like a department together, which is really hard. And James has come in, and within his first year just like to help and—so helpful in taking out administrative things and thinking with us and contributing to the area and helping fantasize with us. And we have Young Joo Lee coming from Harvard next year, who has a practice in augmented reality and performance and virtual performance and things that are you know, I'm so low tech, low phi, like I I'm spreading pudding in my ass, you know, dragging on my carpet hasn't like, there's not like an application for that. So I am really excited for her to come in and help us think through how we might prep students to engage in new technologies and digital technologies in their performance. But I don't know if I have any jousty things. I mean, I'm just sure if we had some drinks, like I probably could say a few things, but…
Am Johal 46:52
Ryan, is there anything you'd like to add?
Ryan Tacata 46:55
No, I don't know, if there's anything—I would just say that Vancouver is really exciting. It's an exciting place right now for I think for performance, I think in terms of the artists that are here, that are making live art, live performance, the venues that are, that are supporting that kind of work. Like there's, you know, from grunt gallery to Western Front to the Dance Center to the Cultch and the Firehall. And it's—I feel like it's a really exciting time to be here and thinking through my own performance practice. But also, what does it, what does contemporary performance pedagogy look like? How might that be tied into some of the exciting activity and artists that are working here beyond the institution? And how, regardless of what discipline we think we might be in, how we all might be able to get together more, and think across, yes, some of our practices and ideas right now.
And I say that, because I feel like historically, the West Coast has been left out of the more, like exciting conversations around what is contemporary art, and what is at least within the performance worlds. You know, people look to Berlin, or London and New York, and maybe LA now for a little bit, but there's something about Northern California and all the way up to the Pacific Northwest. It's been—it's an interesting—it's a lot of really exciting, dynamic work that I feel really happy to be here now. Meeting all these folks and being with young artists like Sam, and seeing, like, what happens with her career, you know, or being with you, Am, and thinking about how our program might be able to connect in our social classes that we're going to be offering, how that might shape out over the years and what kind of work might come from that and what what kind of students might be exposed to that and what—if they might be sitting next to you doing this very same kind of job, like down the line. It, it feels like such an exciting moment. So I just, I think I would just add that I'm really damn excited to be here.
Am Johal 48:52
Thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar, Ryan.
Ryan Tacata 48:55
Cool. Thank you so much and thank you, Sam.
Am Johal 48:58
Thank you, Sam.
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Samantha Walters 49:03
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with Ryan Tacata! Check the resources in our show notes to learn more about some of the performances and artists mentioned in the episode. Don’t forget to subscribe to us on your podcast listening app of choice and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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