The TSL Archive Project:
A 30-year Retrospective of Mussmann/Bruce Productions

Claudia Bruce was working as an actress, and for the feminist newspaper, Majority Report.  As the reporter covering women’s events throughout the city, Claudia ventured to the Universalist Church to see Linda's 1976 production of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans. Thus began the collaboration that has now culminated in The TSL Archive Project.

Since their initial collaboration in 1976, Linda and Claudia have worked as theater artists exploring the relationship between language and movement.  The original scripts were written by Linda and edited by Claudia.  During the 1970s and 1980s, Linda and Claudia worked with artists from Turkey, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, France, Italy, and places in between. The ensemble was trained using an intensive blend of vocal technique and dance movement and ranged in number from 4 to 12.  The performances were directed by Linda who became adroit at writing for the voices of the individual performers and, specifically, for Claudia who was the central character in all the work. Linda also designed the sets, lighting, lighting boards, and fixtures.

In addition to the original scripts, Linda adapted literary texts and classic plays by writers including Virginia Woolf, Henrik Ibsen, Herman Melville, Shakespeare, Georg Büchner, and Kikue Tashiro.  Their artistic collaborators have included composer, musician, and dramaturge, Semih Firincioglu and set designer, Jun Maeda.

Their productions have been presented in traditional and alternative spaces in NYC such as La Mama E.TC. , Riverside Church Theater, Merce Cunningham Studio, Marymount College Theater, Museum of Modern Art, Japan Society, Cooper Hewitt Museum, Equitable Center, Philip Morris Sculptural Court, A.I.R. Gallery as well as spaces in Canada, Denmark, and throughout the US. 

In 1990, Time & Space Limited joined other artists and organizations in rejecting funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, in protest of the agency's stipulation that recipients of the funding promise not to produce “obscene” work.  The $10,000 grant would have covered 10% of Time & Space’s annual budget.

 “I have been receiving endowment grants since 1979 and I don’t make work that falls under the guideline of offensive work, but it is important to make a stand,” Linda stated in an article in the September 24th, 1990 issue of the New York Times.

In 1991, Linda and Claudia packed up their Manhattan space, moved upstate to Hudson, NY and converted a 120x80ft bakery into the interdisciplinary art space it is now, a gallery and theatre. They have not only continued their creative work for the past thirty years but have affected significant change through the programming at Time & Space Limited and their personal commitments and activism in issues specific to their community. 

Linda and Claudia continue in theater with two new projects each year.   In 2001 and 2002, they returned to La Mama with an original work, "Blind in Time," and an adapted version of "Hamlet."  They have also produced four projects for German radio stations Sender Freies Radio, Berlin and WDR: “Danton’s Death,” “Lenz,” “Grief Has Taught Us Nothing,” and “Time to Talk: The Story of James B. Snead.”

Most recently, they have interwoven new texts with older work in a series called Now & Then.  In 1987, TSL produced "If Kansas Goes," the first in a 6-part series called "The Civil War Chronicles.”  They have taken another look at that text and adapted it to another group of performers including Chloe Monahan (last seen as Alice in TSL's A.L.I.C.E.) and Emily Malina in a piece entitled “Back to Kansas.”

The archives will be housed in the East Side TSL Gallery until mid-May.  Here one can see samplings of 30 years of material—and have a rare chance to get a glimpse of the contributions Mussman-Bruce have made to experimental theater during 30 years of collaboration.

Curator's Statement