Rinde Eckert (Director) is a writer, composer, singer, actor, and director whose music, music theater, and dance theater pieces have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. He has collaborated a great deal with composer Paul Dresher, having written and performed or directed ten pieces of theater or dance with Paul since 1980, including Slow Fire, Shelf Life (with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company), Pioneer (with Robert Woodruff, Terry Allen, and Jo Harvey Allen). Rinde has also worked extensively with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Co., first as a writer performer, and later as a composer, creating seven works since 1987 including Shelf Life, Shorebirds Atlantic, and The Gates/ Faraway near and most recently Breathe Normally. In addition to these collaborations Rinde wrote and performed three radio pieces for New Radio and Performance (Shoot the Moving Things, Cold War Diary, and Four Songs Lost in a Wall), and an evening of theatrical solo pieces entitled Dry Land Divine and Other Stories. In 1992 Rinde wrote, composed and performed The Gardening of Thomas D., an evening length theatrical duet with dancer Ellie Klopp. 1992 also saw the release of Rinde's first recording Finding My Way Home (DIW Records, prod. Lee Townsend). Rinde has worked and collaborated with a wide variety of artists including Michael Palmer, John Sanborn, Joanne Akalaitis, Bruce Nauman, Jerry Granelli, Bill Frisell, Lynn Hershman, Sarah Shelton Mann and Contraband, ODC San Francisco, and Ohad Naharin. His second album of songs Do The Day Over (City of Tribes) came out in 1995. Rinde continues to perform The Idiot Variations (a solo work developed in 1996) all over the United States and abroad (he has performed it in both German and Czech versions). His latest CD Story In Story Out was put out in 1997 on the 'Intuition' label. Romeo Sierra Tango, Rinde's one man Romeo and Juliet (commissioned by The New York Shakespeare Festival) was premiered at The Public Theater in New York on their New Works Festival in 1998. Ravenshead, a solo two act opera written in collaboration with composer Steven Mackey was also premiered in the fall of 1998, first at Penn State University and subsequently in New York at Columbia University.