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Linda Mussmann, Claudia Bruce: Theater's avant garde HUDSON, N.Y. — Time & Space Limited's Linda Mussmann and Claudia Bruce have been making avant-garde theater together since 1976, when Bruce starred in Mussmann's Manhattan production of Virginia Woolf's "The Moment." The duo moved to Hudson in 1990 and opened the TSL Warehouse -- a combined theater, gallery and community arts center -- in a converted bakery. "The TSL Archive Project: A 30-year Retrospective of Mussmann/Bruce Productions" is now celebrating the duo's own theatrical history with a multimedia display in the gallery through mid-May. Q: You first met at Linda's 1976 production of Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans," then began working together a few months later on the Virginia Woolf play. What effect did your initial collaborations have on your work? Mussmann: The Stein piece was a turning point for me, where I started working on heavy-duty language ideas, abstractions and the move away from narrative texts. All that put me even farther out in left field than I already was. Meeting Claudia was crucial because she could do all these really rigorous and difficult concepts of movement and language. She was somebody who consistently had a grip on the work. She became the main performer, and we were able to hinge all of the subsequent work on her. Q:How did coming to Hudson change you, as artists and as people. Mussmann: For me coming to Hudson was probably one of the most exciting things that ever happened. Having a community that one could work on, and work with, was very different than the New York City experience. In New York, you try to isolate yourself or you try to find a community or latch on to a community of artists. Here, there's simply a community -- neighbors, people, people left out, people wanting to participate. All different people who might want to have a relationship with an arts center or an arts group in some way. Bruce: Or not. What we didn't know before we came here was how difficult it is in some places, like Hudson, to engage people. Hudson is a little melting pot of issues, and you just don't skim over that. Q: What are the defining features of Mussmann/Bruce productions? Bruce: Defining features? There are none, in the sense that each production takes its own shape. I always say that our shows, performances, whatever you want to call them, are like amoebas. They have an amorphous, constantly changing shape but they do have a point. All of our work has a political edge, which most of the time is not didactic. Instead, it's just totally ingrained. Q: What is the place of art in our society right now? Mussmann: It's tooting our own horn, but I think the work we're doing here is really key to where art has to move. It's what we need to put into practice. We're trying to muster up all the skills that art is so good at, and put those skills into practice at basic community levels so that all people can create and consume art, and so that it can become as diverse and inclusive as possible. Bruce: People aren't realizing their own ways of expression in traditional settings a lot of times. How do you change that? You expose people to crazy stuff, that's how. When we first came here and opened the place, the audiences were quite sparse. But we realized that people were going to come here one person at a time. That's how it's gone, one person at a time. But now the critical mass is coming around, so that that one person is bringing this person and telling that person and saying things are happening here. We've been working with middle school kids, for example, and now we have programs for teenagers. How do you engage teenagers in thoughtful and exciting creative adventures? Through art, that's how. Through ideas that spark whatever it is they're thinking about. Q: The Archive Project was curated by TSL Managing Director Hannah Jarrell with assistance from Emily Malina. Both are considerably younger than you. Do you feel it represents you? Mussmann: Yes, I think it turned out excellent. The TSL part that you don't see in there is the other things we do, like the films and education and other events that go on here. You see the theater work we've done becoming less densely represented as time goes on, because while we were doing some of the later pieces we were also directing this whole organization. It's kind of hard to figure that out from just looking at the theater pieces up on the wall. Some of the documentation fell off a little as I got older and I got busier. Michael Eck is an Albany freelance writer and frequent contributor to the Times Union. |
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