thirteen ways

Slide, a multi-media, multi-artform, is-it-music-is-it-theater extravaganza by composer/guitarist Steve Mackey and librettist/performer Rinde Eckert, is our VERY BIG PROJECT for 2009. There is a detailed description of the project here.

Mackey and Eckert are each tremendously well-respected in their own right, but as long-time collaborators they have worked together on some important, fascinating projects, including the genre-defying theater-piece Ravenshead. 

Slide was a long time coming. The inspiration for a collaboration came as early as 2001; funding was sought, found and lost; chunks of music and text were written (you can hear recorded excerpts of these here, at the Slide part of our website); the budget grew larger and larger. When I joined 8bb in August 2006 the project had been rejected by as many funding bodies as there are beers at Hopleaf, and the whole shebang seemed doomed.

Then, in early 2007, the forward-looking Kathy Panoff at the University of Richmond’s wonderful Modlin Center and Tom Morris at the Ojai Festival came on board as co-commissioners. This gave the project momentum. 

It was around this time, while 8bb was in New York for a performance, that several of us went to see Rinde’s work Horizon, a profound and moving exploration of faith and doubt. We were completely bowled over by the subtlety and depth of this extraordinary experience, and that gave us renewed motivation to see this project through to its realization.

With the help of our managers, the wheels started rolling. Co-commissioning partners and future presenters began to come on board, first the University of Maryland, then Stanford Lively Arts in California.

By early 2008, it was all systems go!

Rinde and Steve came to our studio in Ravenswood, Chicago, for our first workshop period between September 2 and 5, 2008. We worked long days, and the time was divided evenly between music rehearsals, led by Steve, and theatre “workshops”, led by Rinde.

Music? We re-rehearsed Steve’s old music for the project (three endlessly inventive, wonderful songs), and played through several new sections (including an amazing and bizarre, quasi-12th-century, Notre Dame-style “processional”). In total, Steve had written 30 minutes of music for a show that will end up having about an hour of music.

Below, a YouTube video with some excerpts from music rehearsals. Be warned: these are early rehearsals, with mistakes and roughness! Three songs are featured: the impossibly beautiful “Lonely Motel”, featuring Rinde’s amazing, unearthly falsetto (text here); “Slide of Dog”; and the funkiness of “Depending”, with some pretty awful instrumental balances, thanks to my Canon Powershot’s terrible microphone (text here).

What about theater? For the first day, while Steve and 8bb rehearsed music, Rinde paced our studio, jotting notes, sketching stage diagrams, grabbing and shifting boxes, stools and ladders. What was a sketchy scenario at the beginning of the week gradually gained shape and depth. 

Several times during the week we were brought into Rinde’s confidence, and given a glimpse of a fascinating world. He led us through his preliminary ideas for the project, sometimes bringing thoughts forward fully formed, sometimes thinking out loud, but always encouraging our ideas or reactions. 

I took notes during these moments, and a summary of these flights of fancy, as well as some video extracts, will make up my next blog post.