Hancher commission brings Eckert’s vision to UI stage

By Diana Nollen

By spinning science and philosophy through a kaleidoscope of artistic devises, Rinde Eckert and company are creating “Eye Piece,” a theatrical exploration of vision and vision loss.

Eckert, 58, a much-lauded New York performance artist who grew up in Iowa City and studied music at the University of Iowa, is back to rehearse and refine the work, commissioned by Hancher. Its world premiere will be held Friday at Mabie Theatre in the UI Theatre Building. The play runs through Feb. 14.

It actually was set to be unveiled in November 2008 in Hancher Auditorium, but was among 13 events canceled that season because of the floods.

“We really felt this work deserved to have a great space to be performed in,” says Hancher Executive Director Chuck Swanson, 56, of Coralville. “We wanted it to impact the students, to have the most impact we could possibly have. We knew the situation on campus was not good.”

With the blessing of the funding sources, the premiere was rescheduled for the 2009-10 season.

“We needed to be in a better frame of mind - a better state of facility,” Swanson says. “It was the wise decision to postpone it.”

  The funding was “a real coup” for Hancher, Swanson says. The Association of Performing Arts Presenters awarded the project a $148,700 grant through its Creative Campus Innovations Program in March 2007. The funds will cover a variety of costs, from the artist's fee and production expenses to marketing, evaluation and documentation.

“It's a real big deal,” Swanson says. “It's a very, very competitive process.”

   Among “thousands” of member organizations, Swanson says only eight colleges received grants, intended to integrate artistic programming with the academic environment on campus.

Because the arts are so visual, Hancher reached out to the UI Carver Family Center for Macular Degeneration, then to Eckert in 2006, to develop the project plan.

“Rinde has a history with Hancher going back about 20 years,” Swanson says. “With the nature of the project, we knew we wanted someone who was going to be very passionate about it. ... Plus, Rinde does great work - he does terrific work. He was just the natural choice for this.”

“The parameters were pretty much set as far as subject matter goes,” Eckert says. “It was up to me to decide how to do it. In my proposal, I said I intend to make art, not a documentary. I'm equipped to do thearical arts, taking information and elements of interviews and fashioning them into an artistic work.”

The topic fascinated him.

   “It's hard not to be intrigued when you're dealing with something as large as vision and vision loss,” Eckert says. “The subject is so broad. You can get into the genetics of inheritable eye diseases. ... (The theme) brings up a boatload of philosophical questions.

Blindness is an issue not just for the blind. We find ourselves blind to things we need to have eyes opened to. It's a metaphor. And the politics of the impaired and how we ought to treat the impaired in a civilized community. Certain political issues that arise - issues related to science and art, issues related to science and medicine. To what degree is medicine a science or is medicine an art? That's a very interesting question.”

The research phase brought him to campus for about six weeklong stays. “I had to do a lot of just hanging out, attending seminars, trying to get a handle on it, absorbing as much as I could, and reading,” he says.  

When developing the script, he turned to radio plays to make the work accessible to both sighted audiences and people with vision impairments.

“There's two ways to go about it,” he says. “The usual, conventional way is to provide the unsighted with a kind of recorded narrative of someone describing what's going on. I was inspired by old radio plays using sound, embedding description in the dialogue in order to get people to be able to visualize what's going on.”

He's also using a Greek chorus to reinforce what the audience is seeing.  

“There's a remarkable piece of choreography near end with 12 actors, who are more or less dancers, where it can't be adequately described what we're doing, so it takes the form of a dream. The main character describes his dream and the description of this dream is the dance. It's a poetic description, not a straightforward description.

“Four people are seated in chairs (like) wallflowers. That immediately sets the tone, dealing with impairment issues of marginality. The dance immediately becomes indicative of the marginality of people who are not asked to dance. They begin being intoxicated by the music and go into a kind of ecstatic dance while seated in their chairs.”

Eckert held auditions in September in Iowa City. The cast includes two children, 16 UI students and community members, plus Eckert and four musicians performing his original score. The cast spent two weeks of intensive rehearsal in October and started again the second week of January.

In the end, he hopes audiences “walk away with a better understanding of the world of blindness and vision loss, their many permutations and philosophical dilemmas. There's a lot to be taken in; it needs to be taken in a form that's not overly preachy, but arguments have to be made.”

 Fast takeArtist information: www.rindeeckert.com

What: Hancher presents world premiere of “Eye Piece” by Rinde Eckert

When: 8 p.m. Feb. 5, 6, 12, 13; 2 p.m. Feb. 7 and 14

Where: Mabie Theatre, University of Iowa Theatre Building, 200 N. Riverside Dr., Iowa City

Tickets: $17 adults, $15 seniors, $5 UI students and youths, at the Hancher Box Office in Old Capitol Mall, (319) 335-1160 or 1-(800) HANCHER, www.hancher.uiowa.edu or at the door