Eighth Blackbird Takes Steve Mackey & Rinde Eckert’s Slide On Three-City Tour

Created especially for the Grammy Award-winning sextet eighth blackbird is Rinde Eckert and Steve Mackey's new music-theater piece, Slide, which the group premiered last summer and to which it now devotes a U.S. tour, with performances in Richmond, VA (March 1), Chicago's Harris Theater (March 24), and College Park, MD (April 9-10).

Anticipating the group's Chicago premiere of Slide (2009), Tribune critic John von Rhein described the work as one of the "winter's best," exclaiming: "Leave it to this adventurous sextet to come up with the most provocative new-music event of the spring." eighth blackbird describes the piece as:

"A concert-length music/theater work conceived, written, and performed by eighth blackbird, Steve Mackey (composer/guitarist), and Rinde Eckert (actor/singer). Eckert, a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, plays an enigmatic psychologist struggling to describe an experiment that examines subjects' reactions to slides projected both in- and out-of-focus. The results reveal that our decisions are based on habits or conventions that make it difficult for us to see clearly. Slide uses the experiment as a metaphor for today's world, where persuasive images are employed to sell a commercial or political product. The work explores the seduction and manipulation of the American psyche. The show's goal is an unmediated exploration and expression of sound, text, movement, and image. eighth blackbird, Steven Mackey, and the projected images play important onstage roles."

Once again the members of eighth blackbird have won new audiences with a work that exploits all their talents - for music, choreography, drama, and memorization. The group brings the multi-media, multi-art form production to Chicago's Harris Theater on March 24, as part of its Slide mini-tour. Opening at Virginia's Modlin Center for the Arts, where eighth blackbird performed the work on March 3 during its fifth residency at the University of Richmond (March 1-5), the tour's final stop will be at the University of Maryland, with performances of Slide on April 9 and 10 in College Park's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

A list of eighth blackbird's upcoming engagements follows below, and much additional information is available at the group's web site: www.eighthblackbird.com.

 

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