Rinde Eckert, Alessandro Sciarroni reviews: Scattered remains

Avant garde theater artist and dazzling jugglers close TBA festival

Oregon Artswatch
By Brett Campbell
October 2, 2016

“There certainly is a lot of stuff here,” Rinde Eckert mused aloud as he gazed around the cluttered stage at the outset of My Fools, his retrospective show that highlighted the closing night of this year’s Time Based Arts Festival. Framed by a desk on one end and a piano on the other, the stage at Portland’s Winningstad Theater boasted costumes, props of various species, a projection screen, MacBook, rows of little cards mounted on sticks that he carried to each “station” on the stage as he performed there, and above all a wide array of musical instruments. All attested to the New York based solo performer’s vast range of skills and artistic creations. For the next hour, we wondered: with all that stuff strewn about, what was he going to do next?

Rinde Eckert performed at Portland’s TBA festival.

If anyone is entitled to a Greatest Hits show, it’s Eckert, the supremely versatile singer/writer/instrumentalist/performer/director who, over three decades and more than five dozen works (averaging two per year) has been making some of the era’s most original performance art. We soon realized that the busy stage was meant to evoke the multidisciplinary artist’s fecund career, and possibly his richly furnished mind. So, yes, a lot of stuff indeed...

Concert Review: Rinde Eckert delivers a display of his versatility

The composer, lyricist and multi-instrumentalist offers comic and operatic touches at a USM show.

Portland Press Herald
By Allan Kozinn
September 4, 2016

GORHAM — The University of Southern Maine has an unusual cross-disciplinary project in the works for its new academic year, and on Saturday evening the school presented a concert by the composer, lyricist and multi-instrumentalist Rinde Eckert as a glimpse of what’s in store.

Eckert, who lives in New York and is an estimable figure in the avant-garde music-theater world, will be working with his frequent collaborator, the San Francisco-based composer, guitarist and drummer Paul Dresher, as well as the students, faculty and staff of the university’s music, theater and art departments, on a new work to be presented in April...

The Eternal Vaudeville of the Spiritual Mind

Review on "HORIZON" at New York Theatre Workshop

The New York Times
By Ben Brantley
June 6, 2007

From left, David Barlow, Rinde Eckert and Howard Swain in the New York Theater Workshop production of "Horizon." CreditCarol Rosegg

God is in the curriculum in the lively lecture hall that has been made of the New York Theater Workshop, where Rinde Eckert’s “Horizon” opened last night. But even the fiercest secularist should find pleasure in this engaging performance piece, which is set in the seminary-without-walls of one man’s mind.

The furnishings of that mind will look familiar to anyone with a glancing knowledge of Christian philosophy in the 20th century. “Horizon,” directed by David Schweizer, is Mr. Eckert’s homage in song, sketch and rumination to Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), generally acknowledged as the most influential American theologian of his time...