PERFORMING ARTS : Dante as Performance Artist : Rinde Eckert is a classicist in avant-garde disguise. Or, perhaps, the reverse. The work of the Italian poet is a nice starting point, anyway.

Bay Area writer-performer Rinde Eckert is sitting on the lawn in the UCLA sculpture garden, talking about “The Gardening of Thomas D.” “I had done a series of musical pieces that stayed in a confessional realm and I wanted to get away from that,” says the artist of his performance piece based on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” “As a writer, I thought it was time to look at some cultural icons.”

Classic texts aren’t usually raw material for performance art. But Eckert--one of the preeminent and most versatile figures of the West Coast music-theater avant garde--is something of a closet classicist, and proud of it.

“My contention is that we don’t need to worry about being contemporary,” says the operatically trained tenor. “I really don’t care whether something is avant-garde. I go where the mojo is. It’s pan-historical. All I’m interested in is whether the work works. If there’s integrity to the work, then it satisfies me.”

This is not the party line of that notably amorphous genre known as performance art, of course. But Eckert is no typical performance artist. “The task of performance art is to find out how this form sustains a lifetime of thought, application and work,” he says. “How does it begin to have the feeling that I have listening to Mozart or reading Dante, where it just feels like it can go on forever?”

A familiar figure in the world of the interdisciplinary stage, Eckert has lately become increasingly interested in the formal aesthetics of classical texts and music. His “The Gardening of Thomas D” will be presented at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse this Friday and Saturday.

Working with a text like Dante’s has helped him refine his ideas about performance art. “I saw possibility in this multidimensional form of art, where you’re capable of going from something purely theatrical to something purely visual, and then to all of the stops in-between,” says Eckert. “If I can develop a form that gives me some of the satisfaction that I see in the great works of the past, then my time will have been well spent.”

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Eckert, 43, trained at the University of Iowa and the Yale School of Music. He moved briefly to New York to try his luck at a musical theater career, but ended up hitchhiking to California in 1974.

First recognized on the West Coast as a singer/performer, in both opera and the works of his fellow Bay Area experimentalist, George Coates, Eckert has been based in San Francisco for the past decade. There he has developed a reputation as a multitalented interdisciplinary artist.

He’s best known for a series of opera-theater pieces created in collaboration with the Berkeley-based Paul Dresher Ensemble. Eckert’s last L.A. appearance, in fact, was in Dresher’s political opera “Pioneer”(1990), seen at UCLA in 1991, for which the tenor-actor-writer penned the libretto.

“Pioneer” was the third and final work in Dresher and Eckert’s “American Trilogy,” which began with the 1985 “Slow Fire” and continued with 1989’s “Power Failure.” “ ‘Slow Fire’ was a personal, psychological landscape,” says Eckert. “ ‘Power Failure’ had to do with the nexus of business and religion. ‘Pioneer’ had to do with a more abstract concept of exploitation and exploration. I drew on my own experience for ‘Slow Fire’ in particular.”

“The Gardening of Thomas D” represented a departure from that trilogy.

The 80-minute work, which Eckert authored and performs in (along with modern dancer Ellie Klopp) premiered in San Francisco in 1992. In it, an accountant who’s having a crisis of faith is helped out of his rut by an angel. The protagonist eventually returns to earth, where he creates a garden refuge for himself.

“The Gardening of Thomas D” is inspired by Dante, but that’s just the jumping-off point. “This was my first piece that required exhaustive research,” says Eckert, who consulted critical commentary on Dante as well as other resources. “But my intention was not to do an homage to Dante.”

Eckert wanted instead to fashion a piece for the 1990s. “I was interested in creating a work for this time rather than pointing everybody to the remarkable work of an earlier time,” he says. “There was no need to try and do it better than Dante. He did it as well as it could be done.”

The result is by no means a takeoff on the “Divine Comedy.” “I quickly abandoned the specifics of that work and looked at it for formal properties that I could apply to my own work,” says Eckert. “I came up with a series of metaphors that had a dynamic relationship with that work, although anyone coming to (my) work wouldn’t need to know anything about Dante.”

“The Gardening of Thomas D” has never been seen in L.A. before, but it’s not Eckert’s most recent work. “Awed Behavior” premiered in San Francisco last year. The performer does not appear in the piece, based loosely on the tempestuous marriage of novelist Mary Shelley and the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

“Awed Behavior” was yet another collaboration with Dresher in which the team turned to cultural icons rather than the autobiographical material so popular among performance artists. “There are a lot of personal narratives and storytelling out there,” says Eckert. “But a lot of the performance artwork I had seen was getting shallow, becoming too easy.”

Eckert prefers instead to build upon the foundation of Western literature, music and theater. “Because I have a classical background, I want a vehicle that will locate me in history,” he says. “I never felt like I wanted to lose my connection to the history of Western thought and art.”

But Eckert’s fondness for the canon isn’t merely sentimental. “You look at classical works and there’s always an overall formal logic to them that transcends all the exigencies of content,” he says. “I’ve been looking to the great models of form, and Dante is amazingly formal, a mathematical puzzle that rivals Bach in its formal structure.”

It’s a complexity that the artist finds inspiring. “The more you get into it, the more you see how the thing works,” he says. “I love that feeling of a work that you can keep going into, seeing one part of the puzzle reflected in some other part. It’s intimidating because it’s so beautifully done.”

Ultimately, Eckert would like to define an aesthetic model for performance art. “It may be a slightly musty concern on my part, but the model for me is a (dramatic) situation that ramifies into an infinite metaphoric matrix,” he says. “I keep looking for the situation that will do that, rather than just having a collection of interesting things connected by virtue of certain abstract qualities.”

The benefits of such a paradigm, says Eckert, would be akin to “what sonata form does for classical music.” “It has a formality to it that has an intrinsic poetry, regardless of what we understand as its political or psychological consequences,” says Eckert. “It’s beautiful in and of itself. I’m a long way from realizing that entirely, but it seems like a worthy pursuit.”

* “The Gardening of Thomas D,” Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m. $28. (310) 825-2101.