Claudia Bruce

Claudia Bruce
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Born	(1946-02-17) February 17, 1946 Tupelo, Mississippi
Years active	1976–present

Claudia Bruce was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Mignon Humphrey Bruce and James Leonard Bruce, and, from the age of 3, was raised in Cornelia, Georgia, by a family with “strong feminist proclivity”. In 1965, she began participating in the first Summer stock theater company established in her small town. For 10 summers, she acted, danced, sang, built sets, painted backdrops, and made costumes for Appletree Theatre.

From 1962 to 1968, Bruce attended Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia, where she participated in college and local theater productions. She spent her junior year abroad in Paris, France, at the Sciences Po.

Career

1969-1976: Early career

In 1969 she moved to New York City, eventually settled in the East Village, Manhattan, and got a job as an usher at Oh! Calcutta!, a bawdy, avant-garde Off-Broadway theatrical review. During the 1970s, while working as a waitress by day, Bruce began working in the evenings for the feminist newspaper, Majority Report. In 1976, her reporting led her to Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York Church where Linda Mussmann’s Time & Space Limited was presenting an adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Since that time Bruce has been Mussmann's artistic collaborator, life partner, and muse on hundreds of projects and productions as well as co-director of TSL.

1976-1991: Time & Space Limited in New York City

From 1976, TSL was based in a storefront on West 22nd Street in Manhattan. Over the ensuing 20 years, while using the storefront as a creative space for thinking and performing, Mussmann and Bruce collaborated on scores of original and adapted multi-media performances which incorporated 8 mm film, audio and video tapes, overhead projections, and set and lighting designs in site-specific installations. Notable works from this period include Room/Raum - a “spoken opera,” performed in both English and German simultaneously, The Bandit Princess - a play by Kikue Tashiro, influenced by Japanese forms, Paperplay - a text/dance piece which “attempts to delineate form (movement) from content (words),” and The Civil War Chronicles - a series of six productions, in collaboration with composer/musician Semih Firincioğlu, focusing on various episodes leading up to and including American Civil War.

During the 1970s and 80s, Bruce was introduced to Eastern art forms including Noh, Kabuki, and Aikido, which she incorporated into a unique performance style that included complex vocal techniques encompassing the extremes of speech and singing. Bruce showcased these skills in adaptations of Georg Büchner's Danton's Death, and Lenz (with music and prepared piano by Firincoğlu). Both works included texts "scored" by Mussmann and translated from the German, especially for TSL, by Hedwig Rappolt.

In 1980, Bruce collaborated with videographer Doris Totten Chase on a short performance piece with text by Mussmann called Window. The project was filmed at Chase's studio in the Hotel Chelsea on 23rd Street.

The TSL theater company toured both nationally and across Europe, which lead to Westdeutscher Rundfunk commissioning Mussmann to adapt several of her stage productions into Radio drama|radio plays and which also lead to a period of experimentation in audio, including further broadcasts on Sender Freies Berlin, WAMC Albany, WGXC , as well as independently-distributed audio tapes.

1991-Present: Time & Space Limited in Hudson, New York

In the early 1990s, Bruce and Mussmann moved TSL upstate to Hudson, New York, where they converted a former bakery into their new performance space. The size of the building allowed them to expand their programming to include art house movie screenings (16 mm film and, later, digital cinema), live broadcasts of opera and theater, music and dance performances, art installations, community outreach programs, while continuing to create and present their own work. During their first decade in Hudson, they presented Thoughts on Moby Dick (inspired by Moby-Dick), Mao Wow (based on the life of Jiang Qing, and Going Over Kansas, along with many others.

A number of one-woman shows required Bruce to operate the technical equipment, and trigger audiovisual effects in-character, while delivering her lines. These performances focused on women, both fictional and historical, including Mary Surratt, Marian Hooper Adams, Hedda Gabler, and Lady Macbeth. In each case, autobiographical elements of both Bruce’s and Mussmann’s own lives became part of the script, resulting in a blend of the historical and the personal.

In the early 2000s, Bruce performed several evenings of the songs including those of Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel, songs from the early 20th Century accompanied by Richard Robbins (composer), and a selection of songs from Promenade (musical), an experimental musical comedy with lyrics by María Irene Fornés and music by Al Carmines.

In 2001, Bruce and Mussmann made a rare foray back to the Manhattan theater scene with Blind in Time at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, where they had last performed in 1981 as the official Company in Residence. The one-woman performance was a reflection on American history as experienced during Bruce's and Mussmann's lifetimes, including the dawn of Space exploration|space exploration, the Assassination of John F. Kennedy|assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War, the Feminist movement, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, and the election of George W. Bush.

In 2011, Bruce performed Words and Music, an evening of original songs co-written with Mussmann and others, selected from the catalog of TSL productions.

On July 24, 2011, after nearly four decades of partnership, Mussmann and Bruce were married, seconds after the Marriage Equality Act (New York) took effect at midnight. It is possible that they were the first same-sex couple to be legally wed in the state of New York.

Selected Credits

Stage

• 1978, The Bandit Princess
• 1978, Room/Raum
• 1979, Door
• 1979, Window
• 1981, Kon'surt
• 1981, Lenz
• 1981, Danton's Death
• 1982, Paperplay
• 1982, Nebraska of Questions
• 1983, Is The Dialogue Read
• 1984, Room/Raum II
• 1984, Camouflage
• 1985, Avoidance and Peculiar
• 1985, Flatlands and Little Remarks
• 1986, Omaha to Ogden
• 1986, Silent When Loaded
• 1986-1989, The Civil War Chronicles:
  • 1987, Cross Way Cross
  • 1987, Blue Scene Grey
  • 1987, If Kansas Goes
  • 1988, Mary Surratt
  • 1988, Go Between Gettysburg
  • 1989, Lincoln Speak
• 1989-1992, Clover Trilogy:
  • 1989, Little Stumps and Real Conversations
  • 1990, Little Stumps - The Deal
  • 1992, Silhouettes and Souvenirs
• 1990, M.A.C.B.E.T.H.
• 1992, Grief Has Taught Us Nothing
• 1995-1999, Thoughts on Moby Dick
  • 1995, Chapter One: Looking Out
  • 1998-1999, Chapter Two: Pursuit
• 1996, My 20th Century
• 1997, Going Over Kansas
• 1999, Mao Wow
• 1999, 6 Simple Machines
• 2000, Fast Food
• 2001, Blind In Time
• 2003, TeeVee
• 2006, Back to Kansas
• 2008-2009, Her Story
  • 2008, Act I
  • 2009, Act II
• 2011, Words and Music
• 2020, 10.10.2020

Radio

• 1989, Danton's Death, WDR Radio, Cologne, Germany
• 1989, Little Stumps and Real Conversations, Independent
• 1993, Lenz, WDR Radio, Cologne, Germany

Film

• 1980, Window - Directed by Doris Chase
• 1991, Long Distance (Narrator) - Directed by Curtis Imrie

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