Going to a Dead White Zombies show is always an adventure.
—The Dallas Morning News
Dead White Zombies is one of the most interesting theater companies in North Texas, offering immersive experiences and so-out-there-it’s-cool scripts by Thomas Riccio. Reality and dreams collide. Will you be talking about it for days afterward? Definitely.
—DFW.com
Post Disciplinary Experimental Site-Specific Meta Theatre Performance Installation Whatever
Dallas, TX
Since 2011
You look worried.
Thomas Riccio, Poo Pah Doo
We are malcontent theatre, performance, visual, sound, and installation artists, ironic & fun-loving agent provocateurs in an age of intellectual and cultural leveling, conformity, franchise, and mass marketing to the lowest and most banal common denominator.
We simply do things the way we want to, where, and how, because we don’t know what else to do. Our emphasis is on new, experimental, site-specific, and collectively created performance work that defies categories and conventions.
We are Dead because we are White, pale reflections of what was once. We are Zombies because we are still walking around, empty, searching for meaning, thinking we are still alive.
Founders: Luke Lafitte, Lori McCarty, Brad Hennigan, & Thomas Riccio
The Dead White Zombies puts the pedagogy of mythology and anthropology right on the line of Dallas culture, blending the politics, pastimes, and social structures of the city with the cosmology of classical paganism and a variety of shamanistic traditions, both ancient and contemporary.
—Glasstire, Texas
T.N.B. Experience
Like all DWZ performances, a concrete and visceral individual story is set in relief on a large, mythic canvas, a place where the boundaries between mythic and personal, reality and artifice are permeable, where time is transcended, and the distinction between spectator and performer blurred. This intersection of the particular and the mythic is a central theme for DWZ and an evolution of my ritual and indigenous performance work as an artist and scholar. This deliberate theme/device/operative of blurring performance boundaries is central to the aesthetic of DWZ and, I believe, to our moment in history.
—excerpt Theatre Forum article by Thomas Riccio
It’s all about the form now. Content still matters, but we’re really digging deeper beyond content because, in a sense, we’re filled up with content. Everything is repeating itself; it’s like a recursive loop. Everything is being appropriated, or post-modernism is a symptom of that. It’s no longer about the surface noise of things swirling around and repeating recursively. Now, it’s about questioning, interrogating, and transforming the form, which is much more difficult, deeply rooted, and more contentious for people because it’s so ingrained in us.Interview excerpt: Brett Cowell with Thomas Riccio.
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