Ric Royer

Ric Royer charitably sent me a copy of his 2007 performance art piece realized as a book with accompanying c.d., There Were One & It Was Two: Annotated Artifacts from The Doubles Museum. This is a very original and absorbing work. The c.d. roughly parallels and follows the text, but Ric occasionally departs from the text and improvises...he recommends reading the booklet while listening to the c.d. so you get a sort of steRoyer-ophonic effect. The disc has "sound by John Berndt" and this generally complements Ric's performance and spoken word texts very well.

The delightful hoax Ric promulgates is that of a mythical circulating collection of artifacts gathered by two individuals, Jill Millings and Dr. Armando Rudge. These include oddities like obsidian mirrors, two-headed nickels and cats, highly improbable recurrences of unlikely moments captured on film, and other oddities. Think: a more intellectual Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum. Royer gives us some photographs of some of these artifacts and interweaves discussions of the artifacts' history and doubling properties, while adding voyeuristic asides, odd speculations on the erotic/love relationship of Rudge and Millings. Royer sees these founders' relationship as yet another example of doubling and drops disturbing tidbits about their inner psyches (which are in doubling turmoil) like breadcrumbs in a Grimm forest you DON'T want to follow any further. The effect of looking at these strange objects (and I confess I Googled at least TWO of these, being totally bamboozled, saying to myself "There's NO WAY this man invented THIS one!" only to find out he had) is one of delightful disorientation, the sense that life has a mysterious subtext we've been missing all these years. But then I should have put in a SPOILER ALERT, as much of the fun of listening to this, and reading this (and I read this while the movie Pulse was playing in the distant background!) is trying to sort out reality from fiction. It reads rather like an episode of the X Files scripted by poet Dan Featherston. (If you don't know his books, check them out!) Really, I think the whole thing should be adapted as a film by David Lynch. Isabella Rosselini would make a great Jill Millings if she and Lynch had an amicable split.
:-)

Here's an excerpt from the booklet, just to give you a feel for Royer's writing style, which leans towards the poetic essay...

"The way we handle our fear of the unknown (Xenophobia, also fear of strangers) is often not to make familiar, but to ignore, or if possible, to destroy. The fear of twins (Concerophobia, also fear of simultaneity) provoked many primitive cultures to kill one or both twins upon birth, believing that the second was a physical manifestation of the soul or that they were created by animals, cursed fruit, or daemons. This ancient geminicide has not been forgotten by the zygote dividers but lies repressed deep down, primitive remnants from a history of misunderstanding. And History has a tendency of repeating itself. And so too the present, and so too the future."

Ric does riffs on some of his texts, sometimes allowing his voice to abandon language for vocalizations, spooky soft erotic howls or ululations that still seem to be speaking sentences to us. He has an interesting voice that floats somewhere between genders, making yet another doubling effect. The whole package is attractively designed and there are some homoerotic elements in the discussion of the male twins featured on the cover of the disc. He has some strange appendices, which include a poem based on creation myths with a strong performative bias to it, and some frightening (sampled?) texts on things like the mechanics of dying, a medical examination of a hermaphrodite turned erotic experience for some nineteenth century doctor, and some recent Wilder Pennfield-type discoveries concerning the brain and its perception of "other."

As I said, this is a very original work and seems like something that could easily coalesce into a really interesting movie...well, I guess it already is!

You can order this work, find more on Ric's very fecund creativity & performative peregrinations, and see his cute phiz here: http://www.ricroyer.com/ricbio.htm