An ongoing, thirty-year pan-cultural folk, ritual, and shamanic performance research and documentation project. The goal is to 1) investigate and document vanishing traditions and 2) articulate and promote an alternative, earth-centric performance expression for our contemporary world. The project's ambition is to offer a new form of indigenous performance, founded in traditional expressions and shaped in response to a globalizing world threatened with environmental collapse. Appreciating and re-imagining the wisdom and expressions of those who have lived traditionally with their indigenous place to create a new/old way of being with the earth. We are all becoming indigenous again.

Shi: I am drawing in the water action, its power comes from the master Lao Zi the master of all Taoism. I write the sides characters in the water on the table. In the process of the magical words transform the water becoming the “Law Water” or magic water. Riccio: How does the water become magical? Shi: Magical words taught him from his teacher…you must decide to accept the words on special ritual step by step the words are given.

Riccio: You are well traveled and have demonstrated on TV and around the country. Why do you do this?

Shi: I am also a teacher—travel and showing others is the metamorphosis of learning—just like a tree. If the Tree grows from branches new branches—you learn from other branches not from your family. I learn and I teach.

Riccio: Who taught you?

Shi: I Learned from my father—I learned from his trunk. At the trunk is where it is more real, more magic—at the branches the magic is not as strong. I get up very early to recite the magical words to learn how to make and hold the water magic.

I get up very early to recite the magical words to learn how to make and hold the water magic.

Riccio: How long did it take you to be initiated as a Badai?

Shi: It was twenty-one days. But this was after a long study with my father. I was about twenty years old when I started with my studies.

Riccio: Did you want to become a healer or were called?

Shi: The spirits called me. The spirits know my family well. For many generations, my grand and great grandfathers, and beyond were healers. One son only each generation is chosen to carry this family forward. I was chosen. Only the most honest and dutiful is chosen.

Riccio: How do you eat the water bowl?

Shi: If the spirits are with you must be able to do it! You must bite the bowl without hesitation—it is the test of the gods.

Riccio: Now you are training others. If I wanted to become your student what would you tell me?

Shi: There are pre-conditions before we can begin. You must agree with your master and swear to your master to tell him all the things you can and cannot do. You must kowtow to the master. And as your master I must judge you honestly and watch and have a good heart—to avoid evil or just do it for money. If the master and student follow this way then the student will become a healer and begin their own practice.

!Xuu and Khwe Bushmen, Kalahari

Oral History Recording Project--See Shamanism Page for Performance Project

Gomez's telling of the "Two Stones" brought the group to life. Everyone wanted to tell the story as they remembered it. We agreed that "Two Stones" would be the basis of our performance. With a large artist's pad at the center, the group gathered in a circle. The drawing of the story and the agreement to perform the story suddenly gave our work an objective, structure, and immediacy that was satisfying to the pragmatic Bushmen. The drawing and the narrative also provided us with a medium by which we could directly communicate with one another, without language or a translator. After many drawings and story sessions an agreed-upon telling evolved.

In the desert, there are two stones.

They are by themselves out in the open

Surrounded by grass and small bushes.

The stones are called ~ (n) Whatsu.

‘That means people come out of here.’

They are like two houses with a path.

Both have big holes in them like the entrance to a hut.

The tall stone is a man and the short one is a woman...(continues)

from People Come Out of Here

Korea

Mudang, shamanic tradition

As she spoke Mrs. Jong became younger, almost child-like, her face and shoulders moving with dance rhythms only she heard; occasionally she shuddered with some unseen touch. Her vocal patterns fell into the patterns of a chant as we all watched with curiosity, fascination, and anticipation. Chang Chong-il slept contentedly in her grandmother’s lap. Mrs. Jong’s two lady friends nodded with affirmation, swaying and rocking as if they, too, felt the spirits near. Mrs. Jong’s low singing increased in volume to encourage the spirits to enter the room. Her body shuttered as if suddenly possessed. Concerned, her son and daughter came near and watched their mother speak in the dialect of the spirits. Then Mrs. Jong stopped as suddenly as she had started, looking at us as if someone just startled into wakefulness, wondering why people were staring at her. She lit a cigarette, “The spirits like to smoke,” she laughed. “The spirits are good to me, they protect me when I am on the knives. So I smoke to please them.

from Worlds Away, travel memoir

Nepal

Folk Performances

Stories cover thick the world, people, events, past present future waddle around. What is out there is a ghost. It seems real. I reach for it, whoosh it evaporates something else takes its place. Why does it always change? But that’s okay. Stories are intimate, pass through, around me, caress, seduce, punch, slam bam, what the fuck, bump into, excuse me? I chase them thinking I will understand, please for a moment what is going on, what can I, should I do? Oh yeah, it is all clear now, it all makes sense.

from an interview, Voyage Dallas