From Ann Carlson's Doggie Hamlet (2015)
Dr. Ryan Tacata is a performance maker, educator, and scholar living in Vancouver, BC. He has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007) and received his PhD in Performance Studies from Stanford University. His creative practice is deeply collaborative and engages in place making, ordinary acts, and gift-giving. His recent work includes a minor repair. (2019), an archive-based response commissioned by the City of Chicago for the exhibition goat island archive—we have discovered the performance by making it; Lolas (2017), a performance installation in honor of Filipino grandmothers (Asian Art Museum, SF); For You, (2016–), a series of dedicated performances for specific audiences; and dancing in Doggie Hamlet (2015–) by Ann Carlson, a site-specific dance with four human performers, sheep herding dogs, and 30+ sheep. He has collaborated with Leslie Hill and Helen Paris of Curious on a number of performance and teaching projects, including Writing Desires, Performing Hope (2012) with women from Hope House in Redwood City (a six-month residential alcohol and drug treatment program for women who are released from the California Department of Corrections or are homeless). He received the Diane Middlebrook Prize (2013) in recognition of his feminist pedagogy with the Hope House Scholar Program. His academic research plays critical intimacy in the key of everyday life, and focuses on alternative methods of archival research and performance art historiography. He is currently writing on the occasion of art with an emphasis on social ceremony, art history, and occasional literature. His dissertation "La Mamelle: Bay Area Conceptual Performance Art and The Alternative Art Archive" undertakes the La Mamelle/Art Com archive and various histories of West Coast conceptualism. His work has appeared in Performa, TDR, Performance Research and SFMoMA's OpenSpace. As an educator, his workshops and university classes cover a range of topics, including histories and theories of conceptual art, practice-based research in performance, social practice, body art, automobiles in the avant-garde, and the sporting event. As a Visiting Faculty member, he taught in the department of History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute and in the MFA Theater and Performance Making Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (SF) and University of Chichester (UK). In 2018, he was a Visiting Lecturer for the Abandoned Practices Institute (Lin Hixson, Matthew Goulish, and Mark Jeffery) with Erin Manning, and was Lecturer in the Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture (ITALIC) program at Stanford University from 2018-2020. He is currently Assistant Professor of Performance at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC).
Contact: rtacata@gmail.com
Related Press and Reviews
Theater: “Nine New Fields: Notes on Goat Island and IN>TIME 2019.” by Mark Jeffery (May 1, 2020).
Chicago Magazine: “The Ten” (February 7, 2019).
Performance Research: “A Rhapsody For You” by Helen Paris (November 29, 2018).
Dance Matters: "July 20, "Lolas," Ryan Tacata" by Julian Carter (August 9, 2017).
SF Chronicle: "Asian Art Museum Program Draws on Real World Issues" by Brandon Yu (May 22, 2017).
NY Times: "But is it Art? In the case of 'Doggie Hamlet,' Yes." by Gia Kourlas (April 7, 2017).