Ryan Tacata showed up on those Mem Aud steps like some kind of fringed prophet, that suede jacket with tassels announcing itself before he did, but it was the smile that landed. Not the smile of someone trying to sell you something, but the real thing: an invitation to stop taking yourself so goddamn seriously and just make something.
He’s the rare breed who gives more than he extracts from the room. You know the type, or maybe you don’t, because they’re vanishing faster than independent record stores. The guy who makes your half-baked idea sound like it might actually matter. Who takes the thing you’re working on and, through some alchemy of generosity and intelligence, makes it better without ever making it about himself.
There’s a hunger in him, but it’s not the hollow kind. It’s the hunger of someone who actually believes that performance can mean something, that the archive matters, that the weird experimental shit happening in warehouses and water temples and old mints isn’t just masturbatory cleverness but a necessary interrogation of how we live now. He’s built a practice out of showing up: for Genet, for Gombrowicz, for cloud talk and prayer circles and all the beautiful, difficult work of transformation.
The Franconia Performance Salons were whatever success they were because of Ryan. His collaborations with Angrette and Raegan, that hammer piece, damn. He made the chaos of the Balcony production fun, which is no small feat when you’re staging Genet in the Old Mint. We drank way too much Bulleit Bourbon during Princess Ivona (a bottle a night), but count that up to the freezing warehouse and Gombrowicz’s particular brand of absurdist cruelty.
PhD from Stanford, yeah, but more importantly: someone who understands that thinking and making aren’t separate activities. That the body knows things the brain can’t articulate. That sometimes you need to dance with sheep just to remember what being alive feels like.
Every time I think about working with Ryan, it’s like anticipating a conversation that hasn’t happened yet but somehow already exists. The collaborative joy of finding someone who doesn’t just tolerate your obsessions but meets them with their own, who understands that art making is ultimately about generosity: giving the work what it needs even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard.
He’s an original. And in a world drowning in replicants and algorithm fed sameness, that matters more than ever.
