eclipse

Breder regarded Eclipse I as one of his most successful intermedia performance works for the complexity of the experience. Generators were used to provide electricity for the projections as well as to amplify the electronic score by Experimental Music Studio head Peter Lewis. Breder spent several weeks with the sailing club to choreograph them sailing back and forth on the lake, using their sails as projection surfaces. Slides and films of models and students were projected onto the moving sails. Lewis described the technical side of the performance in his 1976 history of experimental music at Iowa: "Eclipse I by Lewis in collaboration with sculptor Hans Breder, which required for performance a stereo playback system, 6 slide projectors, 3 8mm movie projectors, and several projection surfaces in motion — in this case, the sails of three sailboats tacking back and forth one calm evening at McBride Lake."

Breder described the performance event: "Continuing to explore the liminal, mingling real and virtual space, my event Eclipse I, utilizes the lake and its shores, three sailboats, music by Peter T. Lewis and film and slide projectors. After dark, trees on the shore are illuminated by blank colored slides — pink, red, purple, creating the illusion of a theatrical set. Sailboats, choreographed, move through the “set,” as images of these same sailboats are projected onto the moving boats. Screen and image interact to produce obliteration/eclipse, superimposition, fusion."