[7][8] The purpose of The Bridge is to further collaborative creation of new theatrical hybrids by spanning different disciplines, cultures and generations; and to provide educational programs in the performing and visual arts.
Castle Clinton, a 214-year-old circular stone garrison built in 1811 to protect New York from the warring British, has served as an indoor garden, an opera house, an aquarium, an immigrant landing depot, and the setting in which the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind made her 1850 American debut, courtesy of P.T.
Alan Jay Lerner (lyricist, librettist, My Fair Lady, Camelot), Comden and Green, lyricists-screenwriters (Singin' in the Rain, Will Rogers Follies) tap dancer Honi Coles, (Tony Award winner, My One and Only), Virgil Thomson, (critic and composer, Four Saints in Three Acts), members of the American Dance Machine and of Joseph Chaikin's experimental The Open Theater, and others performed at night and taught master classes during the day.
The festivals' first site, in 1982, was a restored 17th century factory, in the small, medieval township of Saint-Chinian, South of France, (Languedoc-Roussillon region), where the uniforms of Louis XIV's regiments were once embroidered.
[36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53] Betty Comden and her partner, Adolph Green, the prolific lyricists and librettists of Broadway and film musicals such as Singin' In The Rain and On the Town, were participants in the festival.
Her dream was that some day in the future, for example, if Hal Prince wanted to experiment with Japanese Noh players, working with a Swedish lyricist, a Yugoslavian composer, and a Bessarabian choreographer, such an international collaboration would be assembled under the auspices of The Bridge.
In this series, American/international theater artists collaborate with astrophysicists, sculptors, theologians, philosophers, poets, novelists, painters, musicians, choreographers, filmmakers, and others working in a variety of creative, scientific and intellectual disciplines.
[5][6][55][56] In addition, in 1996, The Bridge re-introduced the beautiful 19th century reddish circular stone structure in Historic Battery Park, Castle Clinton, as a remarkable performance space, with the production, Hart and Hammerstein Centennial Plus One.