Written and directed by Thomas Riccio, UTD’s Artistic Director and Professor of Performance Studies, Thomas Riccio

Set and Costumes by Scott Osborn
Lights and special effects by Jeff Stover
Digital and Animation by The Institute of Interactive Arts and Engineering

Kartasi is a world premiere Sci-Fi thriller written and directed by Thomas Riccio and produced in collaboration with UTD Institute of Interactive Arts and Engineering. Kartasi combines live performance, digital, video and animation imaging.

The performance reveals the time after time, when the Great Separation had wiped out all but fragments of memory of what existed before. The Overlords control The Machine, a bio-mechanical entity that connects everything with 'Tubers'. Through the use of the 'Tubers' the Overlords feed and pacify their inferiors who live in the Valley with memories and The Serum. In this world, Memory and The Serum, a mysterious energy-intoxicant, are horded and prized. But all is challenged when Kartasi, a mutant Hoi Polloi from the Outlands stumbles into the Valley introducing a new memory, altering The Machine and reality. When Kartasi enters The Machine, Memory will be set free. Or is it all a Serum dream?

Using a recombinant narrative technique, the sequence of events will alter, adding and subtracting memory, for each performance. Is Kartasi a spy, a villain, a victim, or a hero? That depends on what memory you are watching and controls and best navigates the Machine.

THOMAS RICCIO is a Professor of Performance Studies and Artistic Director at the University of Texas at Dallas. Previous positions include Professor of Theatre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Artistic Director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company and the Dramaturg/Resident Director at the Cleveland Play House. He also served as Associate Literary Director at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard and was research assistant to Robert Brustein. As a free-lance director he stage production at the Teatro d’ Roma (national theatre of Italy), La Mama ETC, and The New York Theatre Workshop, among others. In recent years he has worked extensively in the area of indigenous performance, serving as Artistic Director of Tuma Theatre, an Alaska Native performance group in Fairbanks. He has developed and directed performances with the Zulu of South Africa, the Sakha National Theatre of central Siberia, the Greenland Inuit, several tribal groups in Zambia, Sri Lankan Tamils, the !Xuu and Khwe Bushmen of the lower Kalahari, and a pre-Christian Slavic group in St. Petersburg. He has conducted workshops and presented lectures throughout the U.S. and Internationally he has conducted workshops and lectures in Sweden, Germany, Finland, England, Denmark, Australia and Burkina Faso. He was a Visiting Professor at the Korean National University for the Arts and the University of Dar es Salaam. In 1999 he received a APPEX (Asian Pacific Performance Exchange) fellowship at UCLA. He conducted research in folk and Shamanic performance of the Miao people of Hunan, China in 2001. His play Comeback Für Elvis was produced by Frankfurt’s Kleist Theatre and ran in repertory during their 1995-96 season. His articles have appeared in TDR, TheatreForum, Theatre Topics, Theatre Research International, Performing Arts Journal, and Shamans Drum. For the Fairbanks Drama Association he wrote and directed a highly acclaimed production of Pipe Dreams, a play based on oral histories from the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. He was a panelist (1999-02) for the Edward Albee, Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska. His current interests include performance and research projects with the Miao people China and in the Kisumu district, Kenya. He was in Nairobi during the spring of 2002 where he did workshops at the Kenya National Theatre and for the Edupuppet 2002 Festival. Mellen Press recently published his book, Reinventing Traditional Alaska Native Performance (2003). His article on Kenyan puppet theatre recently appeared in PAJ, Performing Arts Journal (2004). He is currently completing his book of travel stories and developing an Immersion Narrative and Cyber Ritual project in collaboration with the Institute for Interactive Arts and Engineering. This summer he conducted a Meta-Media Laboratory for performers, animators, programmers, and game designers at the University of Texas at Dallas.