David Bridel
Stage director, choreographer, playwright, and master teacher of movement, Mr. Bridel is the Head of Movement and Associate Director of the M.F.A. in Acting program at the University of Southern California. His productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Moliere, Ionesco, Pirandello, Dumas, Priestley, Orton, and others, as well as his own original plays and adaptations, have been seen in Los Angeles, New York, Tel Aviv, London, Chicago, San Francisco, Edinburgh, at Shakespeare and Company in MA, and at the Roy Hart Theatre in Malerargues, France. His choreography and movement direction for opera and theatre includes: Los Angeles Opera, the Mark Taper Forum, the Broad Stage and the Ford Amphitheatre (LA), and the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich. Most recently, Mr. Bridel choreographed Danie Catan’s “Il Postino,” starring Placido Domingo at LA Opera, the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, and the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. “Il Postino” will be featured on PBS Great Performances series later this year. Mr. Bridel’s plays and musicals include “Forget My Name,” “American Fairy Tales” (with Rachelle Garniez), “The Suicide” (with Simon Gray and Raymond Bokhour), “The Heretic Mysteries,” “The Actors Rehearse the Story of Charlotte Salomon,” “Shreds & Fancies,” “The Last Girl,” “The Green Bird” (from the play by Gozzi), and “The Legend of the Dead Soldier” (from the poem by Bertolt Brecht). He received an Entertainment Weekly Special Events Award, NYFA Fiction Award, and his productions have been nominated for the LA Weekly Theatre Awards. His non-fiction has been published by Bloomsbury. He is a contributor to “American Theatre Magazine.” He co-founded Studio Six, LA’s first Clown School. He will be teaching in Beijing and Hong Kong; has new stagings of “Il Postino,” and his “Gods and Marionettes” will be remounted in Los Angeles; and he will premiere his own one-man show, “I Wish: Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”
What are your recent projects?
Earlier this year I was working on “Gods and Marionettes,” an original dance/theatre production which I co-directed with choreographer Kate Hutter. It brings together the Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company with a cappella musical sextet Sonos. The piece investigates certain themes we “unearthed” from Greek tragedy, and it fulfills a desire I’ve long had to combine music, dance and text in a single production. I’ve seen many Greek tragedies over the years which left me unsatisfied, primarily because of a lack of integration between music, movement, and the spoken word... “Gods and Marionettes” is an attempt to bring these disciplines together. It's modern and startling but it remains rooted in ancient ideas. The performers are truly inspiring, two very talented groups with open minds, adventurous hearts, and terrific chemistry.
How did it come together?
Initially I had assumed there would be a fixed order to the creative process – the singers would compose music and then the dancers would dance – but in rehearsals things became a lot more fluid. Each group worked freely off the other; looking back, it can be hard to remember who originated any given sequence. Also, I had intended to roughly follow the libretto to the opera, “Elektra” by Richard Strauss, but as result of the open creative process I was inspired to take many more liberties with the written word. In the end I created my own text, far removed from “Elektra.” It’s been a fascinating experience, unlike anything I’ve done before. I credit my collaborators Kate Hutter and Christopher Given Harrison for their extraordinary vision and skill. The production really brings the house down.
How young were you when you began writing?
I was very much a whippersnapper! I was 19 when I wrote my first play; thankfully it’s been lost in the dustbin of history. I was at university in England studying, immersed in the theatrical world, completely invigorated. I wanted to act, direct and write.
Did you know you were also going to direct?
Yes - actually I began directing as early as high school. My first production was a Brian Friel play called “The Freedom of the City” – a very seriousproject for a teenager. Then I naturally grew into directing my own work as well as classic plays. Some say that a writer shouldn’t direct their own material, but I have never believed it. I feel I can unify my vision when I direct my own work.
How does teaching inform your writing and directing?
They are strongly connected. In the classroom, I work primarily with movement. I consider that an emotion is a physical reaction to a thought, and a thought is born of an individual’s mind. And what conditions the mind is the past – history, experience, culture, and so on – and the future, in terms of desire, ambition, and will. So whether I am helping a student to understand the source of their own thinking, or analyzing a dramatic character’s journey through a play, I am consistently examining the same domino effect – how time and circumstance impact thought, which impacts emotion, which impacts the body. It makes sense, then, to apply the same set of criteria when I am in rehearsal or when I am sitting at home and inventing a new play.
What do you learn from your students and the actors you work with?
Well, I’ve begun to notice a delicious paradox that is fascinating me these days. While dramatic characters are essentially “ego-trapped,” (that is to say, completely enslaved by desire), the best actors I have worked with – students or professionals – are completely free of ego and absolutely devoted to the present moment. Maybe that's what makes acting such a unique challenge. Characters live in the past and live for the future, but great actors live in the present alone. Understanding and synchronizing these two paradoxical notions lies at the heart of the creative process in drama.
You also founded the first Clown School in Los Angeles. Why do you feel clowning work is vital for the development of the actor?
Well, I’ve just alluded to it by suggesting the importance of the present moment, as clowning involves a kind of total sacrifice to the “now.” Actors have so much to learn from clowning, and studying the discipline does not mean they have to end up in the circus! One of the biggest obstacles or blocks that prevents an actor (or anyone performing in public) from “arriving” in the present is a tremendous fear of failure. It’s probably true to say that nine out of every ten improvisations are littered with flops, dead ends, embarrassing moments – but can you show me the performer who is prepared to admit it!? Rarely. Most of us are far too busy trying to cover up our problems than to actually admit to them. Well, clowning is here to help. It not only allows us to accept that we are chronically mediocre, it actually develops a language by which we can celebrate our flaws. This can stimulate a truly vital revelation for the actor, when he or she finally understands that it is better to tell the truth about any given moment than it is to pretend something is happening when it patently is not. So clowning promotes an antidote to the twin mentalities of Success and Perfection, which are so fatal to the life of the moment. It gives the same value to Disaster that we would normally assign to Triumph, and allows us to stand in our own failures and our own idiosyncrasies with confidence and trust. It nurtures deep faith in a creativity that lies beneath tired assumptions about doing “well” and being “good.” I believe this faith is a vital component in the life of any artist, and perhaps any human being.
What do you aim for in your writing?
You could say that I like to speak on a broad canvas, to write about large or grand themes. My plays “I Gelosi” or “The Death of Mayakovsky” or “The Heretic Mysteries” all tell stories of entire lives and entire communities that span many years and that often ask universal questions or frame big debates. They are epic in scale. And yet, at heart, I am particularly interested in the ways in which passions can unbalance an individual, can cause a man or woman to make huge mistakes or become blind to their own well-being. So it might be most accurate to say that I aim to investigate the tension between the lives of individuals and their impact on wider communities, movements, and ideas. I find this kind of work intellectually imaginative and spiritually challenging. I'm always excited to find that events in the distant past stimulate a great deal of reflection about my own life today and the lives of my peers, and the errors that we continue to make.
How have you learned to deal with silence in your work? How important has it been in your work?
What a wonderful question! I suppose that silence is the hidden part of any theatrical event. I do think about silence a lot, and often I will use it to stimulate or to provoke. There is no sound without silence, after all, just as there is no movement without stillness (although Hollywood film producers try and cram every moment of their movies with quantities of music, and amounts of over-editing). I enjoy the mystery of silence, the threat and the beauty of it, and I find it to be a remarkably simple way to surprise an audience.
What do you consider your greatest challenge working with students today?
The greatest challenge I face in teaching students is to stimulate their interest in ideas. It's hard to inspire their engagement with questions or themes that don’t immediately appear to impact them. Perhaps it is a consequence of widespread affluence, of an increasing disconnection between the life of an individual and the current of a society. Perhaps modern media is imprisoning them in superficial image-based notions of identity. Perhaps an education once built on “deep” reading has been replaced by one based on test-based instruction, and correct answers have become more important than debates. Whatever the cause, I find that my students are losing their understanding of, and interest in, the greater currents of human thought that motivate our actions. If I introduce a class of students to “Hedda Gabler,” it takes a lot of hand-holding and brow-beating to get them to really try to understand how or why Ibsen came to write this play, what kind of a provocation it caused for his audience, and how that provocation relates to our own lives today. Great writers invent characters that personify the dynamic forces in society. It follows that young actors must have an interest in society – in all societies – to truly understand their “charge,” their duty, their job. But engaging with drama on this deep level is no longer something that young actors anticipate when they begin their studies. I have to open the door for them, and sometimes push them through it. Those who enter willingly into a genuine engagement with their craft can look forward to a rich and rewarding career.
