Today we’d like to introduce you to Summer Broyhill.
Hi Summer, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I’m originally from Marietta, Georgia. As a kid I used to study jokes in issues of Reader’s Digest at the doctor’s office so I could tell them to any adult who would listen to me. Even if the punchline was beyond my grasp, I knew if the joke got a laugh I was in business, I’ve always been an old fashioned ham.
I got my music degree from Florida State University and went on the national tour of “Hairspray” right out of school. A couple of tours and regional gigs later I was performing in the Broadway company of “Hairspray”. I was just barely 24 and I thought “This is it, I’ve made it, smooth sailing from here”. I’ve since learned that an artistic life is an endurance sport more than anything else. When I was 30 I was on the National Tour of “Cinderella” when I got it in my head that I needed to go to grad school. I wanted to do more classical work, more new plays, and really I wanted to reimagine what kind of artist I could be for the rest of my life, the part that was going to feel a lot less formulaic. As a performer you are constantly considering the eye of the beholder and it’s easy to lose touch with what you really think, feel, desire, and what you might change in people’s hearts and minds.
I moved to San Diego with my very game and very supportive husband Mehdi in 2018 to attend the University of San Diego/ Old Globe MFA program and graduated in 2020….right into the pandemic. So I’ve been cobbling together an artistic life in San Diego ever since. I’m an artist first: I’ve performed in shows at La Jolla Playhouse and The Old Globe, and I’ve acted in commercials and short films. I’m an educator: I teach Shakespeare, Acting, Voice, and Movement at USD and Mesa College and I’m a Teaching Artist with the Old Globe. I’m a Classical Pilates teacher at a marvelous studio in Bay Ho called Studio Flo where I specialize in pelvic floor health, helping clients with chronic pain, and continuing education for teachers. I’m a writer: I’ve had works produced in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and most recently at San Diego’s Rosin Box Project where I collaborated on text for a piece by my friend Bethany Green. I’ve definitely found a sense of community here. My husband and I both work at small businesses run by San Diego natives (he works at Travis Swikard’s much-lauded restaurant Callie), and we pride ourselves on knowing our neighbors and trying to cultivate a meaningful life of engagement and inquiry.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I got my Bachelor’s degree just before the 2008 recession, then I got my Master’s in 2020. For the safety and security of humanity I should never get a Ph.D. Clearly every time I go to school it causes a major catastrophe.
Jokes aside though, I think about being an artist like playing viola in the symphony. A lot of the notes you have to play are part of the architecture of the piece, not its most memorable strains. And sometimes you get these multi-bar rests while everyone else keeps playing the music. But occasionally you get the chance to sing the melody loud and long and for a few bars you just LIVE—all dramatic bowing, all relentless vibrato.
The thing is, I genuinely believe it’s all one artistic life. I was an artist dancing on Broadway, I was an artist waiting tables. I’m an artist when I’m creating a role or a song or a play, I’m an artist when I find the right way to encourage a Pilates student into confident movement. And I think more than anything being an artist is about recognizing beauty and comedy and meaning, and seeing what’s worth celebrating in other human beings. You can do that at the checkout line in the grocery store.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’ve sort of realized that I only teach one thing, I just teach it in a lot of different contexts. Without meaning to, I developed a whole philosophy of living based on what works and what keeps things fun in the classroom and in the studio, whether it’s Shakespeare or Pilates: Breathe first and return to your breath always, let everything be temporary, let everything be silly, continue to play and allow every discovery to be a springboard into the next, fall in love with the process, not the product because there is no “perfect” and there is no “done”. And of course I fail miserably at upholding my own tenets all the time, but that’s okay because I keep showing up. Showing up is most of the work.
In my writing and music I’m very interested in reevaluating our relationships with gender, class, and consumption, but make it HAHA. I try to make pieces that draw you in with humor so we can explore tricky philosophical and political territory together in good faith.
I recently finished work on “The Ballad of Johnny and June” at La Jolla Playhouse, and I’ll be performing in “Tootsie” at Moonlight Amphitheatre next month. I’ll also be performing in “The Grinch that Stole Christmas” at the Old Globe for the third year in a row this winter.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
It’s all luck! My new mission of radical acceptance is to try to stop seeing life as a matrix of choices that can be ordered sensibly and in a way that totally circumvents pain and to instead start seeing it as a way that I’m living while stuff happens to me. In this framework, whether the stuff is good or bad is sort of unimportant.
Pricing:
- Private Pilates Sessions $105/55 minutes
Contact Info:
- Website: summerbroyhill.com
- Instagram: @summerbroyhill
- Other: https://www.studioflopilates.com/
Image Credits
Photos by: -Kris Rogers -Jim Cox -Veronika Reinert -Daren Scott -Matt Simpkins
