This is Also Art:

Conversation with Rinde Eckert, Margaret Jenkins, & Michael Palmer

ODC Theater is proud to present This is Also the Art, featuring artists originally scheduled to be produced in ODC Theater’s 2020 season. Join us on Thursdays this fall to see content from the works at variable stages, to hear how artists and their collaborators enliven the works in the liminal times and spaces between performances, and to ask your questions about the continued existence of the pieces offstage.

On Thursday, December 17, Margaret Jenkins and Rinde Eckert will be in conversation with their long time collaborator Michael Palmer. Together, they will discuss Jenkins and Eckert’s current process leading up to the future premiere of Migratory Passages, a new duet thematically related to their previous 3 duets, with the weight of death and transfiguration now countered by the lightness of migratory birds rising from a clear lake to disappear in the distance on their way from one home to another. Migratory Passages was slated to premiere in ODC Theater’s 2020 Walking Distance Dance Festival.

Margaret Jenkins (MJDC founder/artistic director) is a choreographer, teacher, mentor, and designer of unique community-based dance projects. After assisting Merce Cunningham in teaching his work around the world, she opened one of the West Coast’s first studio-performing spaces and a school for the training of professional dancers; developed the nationally-recognized mentorship program CHIME, was a founding member of the Bay Area Dance Coalition and Dance/USA, and has received numerous commissions and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, SFAC Award of Honor, and Bellagio Fellowship.
mjdc.org  

Rinde Eckert is a writer, composer, musician, performer, and director. His Opera/New Music Theatre productions have toured throughout America and to major theater festivals in Europe and Asia. With a virtuosic command of gesture, language, and song, this total theatre artist moves beyond the boundaries of what a ‘play,’ a ‘dance piece,’ an ‘opera’ or ‘musical’ might be, in the service of grappling with complex issues. Eckert describes many of his characters as “little men with big ideas who consequences of their hubris are often disastrous.”