Rinde Eckert is actually a fabulous dancer. (“Bad Dancing,” as you will hear in our conversation, is one of the strategies he deploys to get students out of their heads and into their bodies.) He’s also a celebrated writer, composer, librettist, musician, performer and director, but I'm not sure even this list of roles captures his extraordinary versatility. Just within the past year, for example, Rinde danced with a San Francisco company, played a benefit with a jazz ensemble in New York, composed the score for a new play, wrote a new song for an old Shakespeare play, sang lead in the premiere of a technically grueling yet gorgeous opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, played an Irish warden in Ellen McLaughlin’s update of Antigone called Kissing the Floor, and taught interdisciplinary art, as he has done at Princeton University, the University of California, the University of Iowa, and numerous other schools across the U.S.

Rinde has won a Grammy, was a finalist for a Pulitzer, is a Guggenheim fellow, and has been my friend for more than 20 years. In this conversation, we focus on his recent project of rebuilding his piano technique from the ground up. (Photo: Eva Mueller)

Learn more about Rinde Eckert and his storied decades at the intersection of theatre and music here.

For a great discussion of some of Rinde’s early work, here’s an interview from the journal Theater (Vol. 30, No. 2, Summer 2000) that I asked Robyn to help me track down. I’m adding it here partially so I don’t lose it again!

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