Ric Royer Interview, Part I

Ric Royer is a performance artist who resides in Baltimore, MD. He holds a BA in Theatre with a minor in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, an MA in Theatre Arts from Towson University, and has MA "credentials" from Dartington College of Arts. His work is difficult yet accessible, fast-paced yet thoughtful, vulnerable yet guarded, and a thousand other contradictory things. He is a master storyteller, and the stories he tells are about life and death, and what we do to fill the time from the moment we're born until the moment we die. He is currently an adjunct Professor in Theater, Film, and Video Department at Stevenson University. His work can be found at www.ricroyer.com

I conducted this interview about all things academic and non-academic via email over the last two weeks.

Chris: Describe your current relationship with the academy.

Ric: By “describe your current relationship" are you looking for more than just
status/position within academia?

Right. I feel I can go on forever, so I will limit it to this for now: Liberal Arts: School that teaches how to go to school (until you can teach in it).

I seem to undergo a psychological shift about academia depending on my status within/without it. Yes, the idea of the liberal arts castaways can be tragedy, as exhibited by my own limited employability in the face of serious debt, but it's hard to overlook that academic institutions are also places where many formative transitions can occur, places where the focus is on learning and exploring with intersecting of communities of peers. That doesn't always succeed, but it provides the resources. As I tell my students, if you don't use your institution, you will leave feeling used.

Lately I've been considering going back just so I have time to think. I've also been toying with the idea of starting an event in Baltimore called "School" wherein the focus is not merely on performing a piece or delivering a lecture, but on the discussion afterwards. Each "class" also comes with a suggested reading emailed or printed on theposter for the audience/class to familiarize themselves with the piece/subject prior to presentation.

Ric waves goodbye to Kevin Thurston's soul in the piece "Carry On, Carrion".

Alternative educational institutions are becoming extinct. Two more are scheduled to close or drastically change in the next next year: Dartington and Antioch, so maybe small networks/communities of idea exchange forums need to start developing.

It's great that you are focusing a blog on this subject. Maybe you can apply for a grant to set up liberal arts support groups or rehabilitation programs. Turn this into the profit that has been
promised!

I would like to see some practical discussions too instead of purely theoretical ones. I'm less interested in words like "post-modern" in discussing this subject than I am in words like "legislation". I wonder how much the devaluation of the degree (product of the "Ace Race") has to do with the castaway condition. The world-wide push to use quantitative educational measurements to reflect quality of national education has seemingly reduced each degree by a notch. My MFA is not that terminal anymore. I'm even more obsolete!

My question for you, if it is a question: isn’t the "artist", or more generally anyone who participates in a non-financial economy of cultural commodity/community, categorically a castaway, whether or not he/she went to school to be one? Those of us that paid tuition to be
outcasts feel more of a sense of entitlement and therefore betrayed. If you didn't go to school for philosophy, would you be in a better position in the field of philosophy?

Is that all there is my friend, is that all there is? You know the rest.

Ric Royer (seated) and collaborator G. Lucas Crane in Ric's Attic.

C: The devaluation of the degree has been a long time coming, and relates directly to revaluation of education as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. If we're told that getting a degree is a guarantee of a better life, then more people will try to get a degree. But, accordingly, there is also more of a financial incentive for institutions to provide more degrees to more people - and the quickest way to do that is to lower educational standards and matriculation requirements. Your "School" event seems to subvert the traditional economic promise of the academy, promoting education for the sake of education. Do you think this will also quell the sense of betrayal? If you want to see the discussion move more from theory to practice, as I do, where should an event like this lead?

R: Sure. I'm unsure where it is headed, I mean, what/when is the critical mass? How long can University education continue to usher the populace through the system before most people recognize the uselessness of it? Is it reversible or will it just take time for student behavior to adapt to it and begin changing how they use their environment or choose not to go to University at all. As I just said to Justin Katko when he was in Baltimore last month: not going to school is the new going school. Many people practicing one of the questionable liberal arts degrees like art or creative writing are benefiting from staying away from the academy walls. Personally, one of my mantras as a teacher is to tell my students not to let school get in the way of their education.

As to where the "School" event should lead, I don't know, away from accreditation and finances I suppose. Quite frankly, I dont think there is anything wrong with treating learning as a hobby (operating outside of a financial economy). That’s all most of our major "skill sets" are anyways.

Ric's avant-garde coffe mug that reads "the lip of the elite is ajar".

C: Do you think hobby is the right word? How does that exempt it from a financial economy? By avoiding commodification? If you're talking about an artist doing what he does because he loves it, alright. But if you're talking about the guy who does what he loves but sells it at the craft fair, that has intermittent participation in the true fiscal economy.

R: I like the word hobby. I first started using it in the Pop Experimentalist paper/lecture (which, though dated, still has some snippets you might find interesting). I think hobby is a term worth appropriating. It's always listed below occupation (Dating Game), as if to say the things we like to do cannot be the things we like doing. Hobbies and pastimes can end up being ones career (like professional baseball players and pool sharks), but it rarely works that way. And come on, the guy selling crafts has about as much participation in the "true fiscal economy" as your cat sitting does. Sublimating hobby as something worth feeling good about, something more than an insignificant way to spend your time when you are not making money and making your country work better is a good idea, no? WIthout this sublimation, personal or otherwise, what's left is the shame of being someone that spends all our time practicing our hobbies. Just because it's poetry or music or some experimental form doesn't mean it's too far from making model airplanes. Which reminds me, I did a whole project based on this idea: "Building the Jolly Roger Without Instructions". I have my artist statement for it somewhere if you want it.

C: Talk more about the shame you experience practicing your "hobbies."

R: Well, you know what I'm talking about. It's not like I am ashamed of being a weird writer or performer, it's more about how it can creep in when you are in, say, an airport or highway rest area. or when somebody normal asks you what you do. Nothing, can I just say I do nothing? It would be easier. I just performed at a huge music/performance festival here called Whartscape and there were hundreds of people that are social outsiders, misfits, weirdos, etc but they were all in one room, cheering among the same sensibilities, completely comfortable surrounded by like-minds and like-outfits. That's alright with me. I felt old, but they had a good time, and they, like me, don't always have good times in large groups of random Americans.

Ric eats beans hobo style.

C: Do you think you understood what you were getting into when you went to college? Or when you pursued particular degrees? Do you think you'd have any advice for liberal arts majors?

R: Hmm, that's a hard question because I'm not sure if I really remember why I went to college other than because my friends were going (social pressure). But I do remember switching from the Theatre Department to the English Department in my junior year. I remember it because I feel like it was the first decision I made strictly based on my own experience. I didn't find the Theatre Department rigorous enough, it felt like a continuation of high school. With the poetics community, I found people to argue with. Arguing is the best way to learn in a hurry.

Graduate school was something different. I DID want to become a scholar, I wanted to teach performance studies, write essays, books, crap. And you know what, I don't think I was that bad at it. I think I wrote a strong thesis on a niche-yet-rich topic (instruction art), I could articulate myself under pressure (thanks acting class!), and I had a significant body of practical work to back me up. But almost three years out of grad school, I'm realizing that I'm better at creating/writing/performing performance work, and I like participating in the art community more than I would in the academic community. So although I'm teaching (adjunct), I could be fully committing myself to more reasonable career, but what would I be like if I did that?

Thus, my predicament within this whole "castaway" condition: apply what I got out of college that was practically useful, or apply what I got out of college that gave me a sense of identity.

This is where Ric does his laundry.

C: Tell me about your MA fiasco.

R: First, the MA in writing is a tricky one. Dartington is/was very loose, I went there as a research resident to write my thesis, and ended up completing all requirements for a full MA. But I was never enrolled, so all I have is a piece of paper that says I completed the "equivalent" to an MA in writing. I could have dropped a years worth of international student tuition (20k or so) to have the paperwork, but haven’t bothered. It's too late now as Dartington is slated to be devoured by a larger institution (University of Plymouth) next year to bail them out of financial crisis.

C: When I was considering Graduate School, I went to Charles Bernstein and got a letter of recommendation. We talked for a long time, and he advised me against it. His situation was very different, coming up in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Opportunities were present in the institution (or became available) that are no longer available. I thought for a long time about taking his advice, and decided against it for personal reasons, because I feel I learn poorly in an unstructured environment. But now that I look back at it, I also believe that technology (or absence thereof) unduly influenced my decision. If the internet had existed in the same capacity then as it does now, with it's myriad venues for distribution, social networking, etc., the viability of a sustained educational foray and accompanying soapbox (outside academia) would have seemed more realistic. Do you think it's become more possible (or only become possible, or become possible again, as it was in the decades when Bernstein and Robert Creeley came up) in the last ten years for not going to school to become the new going to school?

R: I dont know if it's a philosophical change, a technological change, or just plain numbers (more people are going to school, so the ones that don't have a "rare" knowledge). But much of it might be the envy and fascination of academia over those who managed to somehow avoid it. I've talked with Eric Gelsinger about this before, a good conversation about the exoticness of the "non-student".

C: What about your workspace?

R: I dont really have a workspace. My whole house really, just here and there.


C: What do you really want to be doing and where do you want to be doing it?

R: I dont know. Not baltimore. Maybe not U.S. Maybe Canada, that would be nice.