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New Exhibit Celebrates 30-Year Collaboration HUDSON, N.Y. — By 1973, when she began working under the banner of the theatre Time & Space Limited, Linda Mussmann was already ensconced in the Manhattan arts scene and fast establishing herself as an inventive avant-garde director, one well-schooled in the works of Pinter, Brecht, Beckett, and Ionesco. Prompted by Gertrude Stein's experiments with language, Mussmann found her own voice with a landmark 1976 production of Stein's The Making of Americans. One night, actor Claudia Bruce, reporting for the feminist newspaper Majority Report, was in the theatre to see The Making of Americans and spoke with Mussmann following the show. The meeting was, to say the least, fortuitous. Less than a year later, Bruce was starring in Mussmann's production of Virginia Woolf's The Moment, and she has been involved in every one of the playwright-director's shows since then — as muse, mouthpiece, composer, editor, and co-conspirator. The duo is now being celebrated in their home space in Hudson, N.Y., with "The TSL Archive Project: A 30-Year Retrospective of Mussmann/Bruce Productions," curated by the theatre's managing director, Hannah Jarrell, assisted by Emily Malina. The project follows the Mussmann-Bruce path from Manhattan to Hudson, through steppingstone productions like Room/Raum (1978), Is the Dialogue Read (1983), M.A.C.B.E.T.H. (1991), and Tee Vee (2003), and on to massive undertakings like the six-part The Civil War Chronicles and subsequent re-explorations such as this year's Back to Kansas. Jarrell, who came to TSL in 2002 from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, says one of the primary goals of the project is "to reconnect Linda and Claudia with the wider performance world after being so closely tied to the local community over the past few years." Jarrell also acts with the group and has never before mounted an exhibition — yet the retrospective features a natural flow and keen visual edge, and it imparts a sense of the information overload that is a Mussmann-Bruce production. "We wanted to give viewers a sense of what it would look like and feel like to come into one of Linda and Claudia's shows," she explains. Plentiful remarks, written in chalk on the walls, echo the way Mussmann used to write out text and vocal scores on the walls of the theatre's West 22nd Street storefront in Manhattan back in the '70s, Jarrell says. Additional archival material includes production photos, annotated scripts, costumes, set pieces, homemade lighting rigs, vocal and music scores, journals, marginalia, design sketches, publicity materials, reviews, and audio and video recordings. Jarrell has even included boxes of 35mm slides, file cabinets, and a small library of Mussmann's notebooks. The exhibit also follows the arc of Mussmann and Bruce's politics. In 1990, Time & Space Limited joined other artists and organizations in rejecting National Endowment for the Arts grants to protest the federal agency's guidelines against "obscene" work. Not long after that, Mussmann and Bruce pulled their operation out of Manhattan and headed for Hudson, purchasing the huge former bakery that now houses all their activities. With the move came a shift in purpose: They began to focus on the needs of the community by establishing educational programs, doing youth outreach work, and presenting films and art shows in addition to their theatrical productions. Mussmann even ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Hudson in 2001. The exhibit reflects the shift in their priorities. For example, the theatre work from 1976 to 1991 is better represented than their more recent pieces, says Jarrell, because "it's apparent in Hudson they've had much less time to do theatre. There's a sense of immediacy to the work they've done here, but it's not as well preserved." Still, Malina says "this is a living archive," noting that Mussmann still raids her old scripts and notes when creating new works, such as Back to Kansas. All see the archive as a learning tool: Once the gallery show comes down, all the materials will be kept on-site and available to students, researchers, and theatre artists looking to reference or re-create the duo's distinctive style. Jarrell and Malina hope that being surrounded by the collective weight of past glories will spur Mussmann and Bruce to create more than their standard two shows a year. "I'd like to see TSL pivot around the archives," Malina says, "back into Linda and Claudia doing more theatre work." |
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