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BY STEFFEN SILVIS
243-2122 EXT. 343 In his "Artist's Statement," Rinde Eckert writes, "I have been trying to build a theatrical logic that is fiercely interdisciplinary." Anyone familiar with Eckert's earlier work would be able to testify to his success in realizing this goal. With his previous Portland performances of The Gardening of Thomas D. and The Idiot Variations, Eckert has established a following among those who still believe that theater should be a dynamic and transcendent experience. Eckert is an accomplished actor, musician, singer, writer and composer whose talent is wedded to a formidable intellect. He is as renowned for his solo work as for his collaborations. He has created a number of works with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, as well as having worked with artist Bruce Nauman and contemporary opera composers Frank Lewin and Gina Leishman. Eckert will be in Portland this week for two events sponsored by PICA. He will be performing his latest piece Romeo Sierra Tango. He also presented an evening of chamber music with the Third Angle New Music Ensemble on Tuesday. The program included two of Eckert's chamber compositions, The Finsterwald Diary and Five or Six Dances. Eckert also performed a solo set of his own songs. A conversation with Eckert is an explosion of ideas, in which the tragic farce of the Treaty of Versailles leads to the life of the famous castrato Farinelli at the court of Philip V. Eckert generously spoke with WW last week about his latest solo work.
Willamette Week: What inspired your latest piece, Romeo Sierra Tango? Rinde Eckert: The process began with a commission from the Public Theater for a new solo work based on Shakespeare. I began rereading the plays and, as a matter of course, came to Romeo and Juliet. I was surprised by it. I saw that something weird was happening in the play. Here's a romantic tragedy on the surface, but underneath there's a kind of alchemy going on. A series of nested dichotomies, starting with the warring parties--the great social upheaval--which gradually moves to a subtler level in the opposition between religion and science. There's all this arcane knowledge in the period. It's the budding of the rational, which you can see happening in the friar's glorious speech on plants, and how good and evil can both be found in the same flower. This sensibility provided a clue on how to view the play, which isn't just a tale of two good kids, as it's been reduced in our popular imagination. As I explored the text further, though, I became more fascinated by the character of Romeo. But I became annoyed with him.
Annoyed in what way? He never learns. He makes mistake after mistake and never stops to evaluate himself. There's not one real self-reflected moment. He's a callow kid never called to account for his actions. But he does want wisdom. Needs it. But to get it he has to look at himself through some critical agency--a moment of self-awareness which will be the death of his naiveté. This gave me the "in" I was searching for. At the time, I had also been thinking about the dilemma of the 20th century. Reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That, I became haunted by the First World War. Here was the death of innocence on a grand scale, and the perfect place to put Romeo. But how do I get him there? [laughs] What if, like Juliet, the poison he takes does not kill him, and he wakes months later to find her rotting away next to him? What if I make a side effect of the poison that he is slow to age, so his life spans centuries? Time enough for him to see himself clearly. He's now placed in the no-man's land of a World War battlefield, caught once more between two houses. Covered in lime and taken for dead, he wakes again among the dead and begins his ritual, which is a daily rehearsal of the play. It's a chemical moment. This is the transforming event in his life, which he has to understand in all its dimensions. So, he rehearses the play, becoming various characters, reinterpreting the play's lines and putting them in a very different context so that you get a completely new read. It's an elaboration of certain themes in Shakespeare, though the text is largely my own. It's been a fascinating journey. |
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