Ryan
Tacata Performance Maker & Scholar

Ryan Tacata showed up on those Mem Aud steps as I was leaving the PhD program, looking like Donatello’s David in a fringed suede jacket with tassels that announced themselves before he did.  Like the jacket got there first and Ryan caught up. And then the smile landed. Not the smile of someone trying to sell you something. Not the smile of someone working an angle. The real thing. An invitation to stop taking myself so goddamn seriously and just make something with him.

He’s the rare breed who gives more than he extracts from the room. You know the type, or maybe you don’t.  He’s 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 (and I don’t use the word alchemy lightly, I usually find it annoying, but here we are), makes it better without ever making it about himself. Most collaborators improve your work and then make sure you know they improved it. Ryan improves your work and then walks away whistling.

There’s a hunger in him, but it’s not the hollow kind. Not the kind that’s eating its own audience. 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. Fucking Necessary. That’s the word, that’s the bet, and Ryan keeps making the bet over and over again. He’s built a practice out of showing up. For Genet. For Gombrowicz. For cloud talk and prayer circles and dancing with sheep and all the beautiful, difficult, mostly unpaid work of transformation.

The Franconia Performance Salons were whatever success they were because of Ryan. Let me say that again: Because of Ryan. His collaborations with Angrette and Raegan, that hammer piece, damn, I still think about it. He made the chaos of the Balcony production fun, which is no small feat when you’re staging Genet in the Old Mint and the building itself is half-haunted and the costumes weigh more than the actors. We drank way too much Bulleit Bourbon during Princess Ivona (a bottle a night… no lie), but chalk that up to the freezing warehouse and Gombrowicz’s and life’s particular brand of absurdist cruelty, all of which required their own portable heating system, which is what Bulleit was for. A bottle a night.

My Polish friends understand.

PhD from Stanford, yeah. Sure. 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. (And yes, that was a real piece. Yes, there were real sheep.)

Every time I think about working with Ryan, it’s like anticipating a conversation that hasn’t happened yet but somehow already exists.  The way some music exists before you hear it. The way some friendships exist before you meet the person. 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. Even when the work is asking you for something you don’t think you have.

He’s an original. And in a world drowning in replicants and algorithm-fed sameness, in a culture that has confused efficiency with intelligence and reach with depth, an original matters more than ever. Ryan is one of the originals.

The rest of us are lucky to have crossed his path while he was passing through.