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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2024
Since its publication in 2005, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau's The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition has provided the received narrative not only for the ways that Viewpoints training is practiced, but also for its history. In their opening chapter, the authors crucially acknowledge that they did not invent this method of training:
In 1979, Anne met choreographer Mary Overlie, the inventor of the “Six Viewpoints,” at New York University, where they were both on the faculty of the Experimental Theater Wing. Although a latecomer to the Judson scene, Mary, who had trained as a dancer and choreographer, attributes her own innovations to those Judson Church experiments. . . . Mary immersed herself in these innovations and came up with her own way to structure dance improvisation in time and space—the Six Viewpoints: Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story. She began to apply these principles, not only to her own work as a choreographer, but also to her teaching.
To Anne (and later Tina), it was instantly clear that Mary's approach to generating movement for the stage was applicable to creating viscerally dynamic moments of theater with actors and other collaborators.
1 Bogart, Anne and Landau, Tina, The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005), 5Google Scholar.
2 Ibid.
3 Overlie, Mary, Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice (Billings, MT: Fallon Press, 2016), viiGoogle Scholar. Subsequent citations of this work are given parenthetically in the text.
4 Mary Overlie, “The Mary Overlie Archive Presents: Window Pieces,” performed with Wendell Beavers and David Warrilow at Holly Solomon Gallery (1977). The Mary Overlie Archive, 2024, video, 1:38:53; https://sixviewpoints.com/window-pieces, accessed 7 June 2024.
5 Mel Gussow, “David Warrilow, 60, an Actor Who Interpreted Beckett, Dies,” New York Times, 29 August 1995, B6; https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/29/obituaries/david-warrilow-60-an-actor-who-interpreted-beckett-dies.html, accessed 24 June 2024.
6 Overlie, Mary, “The Six Viewpoints,” in Training of the American Actor, ed. Bartow, Arthur (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 187–221, at 190Google Scholar.
7 Overlie, Mary, interview by Bogart, Anne, Conversations with Anne (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2012), 469–88, at 477Google Scholar.
8 Bogart and Landau, Viewpoints Book, 17.
9 Overlie, “Six Viewpoints,” 188.
10 Ibid., 189.
11 Ibid., 192.
12 Ibid., 201.
13 Tony Perucci, interview by author, Zoom, 21 July 2021.
14 Though I use the term “containment” in reference to the Truman Doctrine and its commitment to opposing the spread of communism in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Bruce McConachie has also used it to describe a cultural mindset in the Cold War United States, which studies in cognitive science have suggested is characterized by binary, essentialist thinking; that activities were American or Un-American, for example. McConachie, Bruce, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
15 Birringer, Johannes, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 2Google Scholar.
16 Ibid.
17 Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” trans. Régis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 71–82, at 72.
18 Ibid., 74.
19 Ibid., 73.
20 Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” in Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, vii–xxi, at xix.
21 Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism, xi.
22 Lehman, Hans-Thies, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Jürs-Munby, Karen (London: Routledge, 2006), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 35–42Google Scholar.
24 Banes, Sally, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), xiii–xvGoogle Scholar.
25 Ramsay Burt has made this argument in greater detail in his book Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (London: Routledge, 2006).
26 Allen Hughes, “At Home Anywhere: Avant-Garde Dancers Adjust to Anything,” New York Times, 9 February 1964, X18; www.nytimes.com/1964/02/09/archives/at-home-anywhere-avantgarde-dancers-adjust-to-anything.html?searchResultPosition=1, accessed 24 June 2024.
27 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., ed. Hacker, P. M. S. and Schulte, Joachim, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M., Hacker, P. M. S., and Schulte, Joachim (Chichester, UK: Wiley–Blackwell, 2009), 8Google Scholar.
28 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 10.
29 Overlie interview, Bogart, Conversations with Anne, 476.
30 Tonia Sina Campanella, “Intimate Encounters: Staging Intimacy and Sensuality” (M.F.A. thesis, Dept. of Theatre Pedagogy, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2006); https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/1071.
31 Overlie interview, Bogart, Conversations with Anne, 476.
32 Perucci interview.
33 Ibid.
34 Richard Hornby, The End of Acting: A Radical View (New York: Applause Books, 1992), 113.
35 Ibid.
36 Counsell, Colin, Signs of Performance: An Introduction to the Twentieth-Century Theatre (London: Routledge, 1996), 55–9Google Scholar.
37 Aristotle, in Poetics (trans. Malcolm Heath [London: Penguin Classics, 1996]), uses the phrase “structure of events” (12) to describe Plot, which seems to absolve the poet from adhering to a sequential order; yet asserting that “well-being or its opposite ill-being” (11) is the ultimate outcome of the structure of events implies that sequence is necessary after all.
38 Bogart and Landau, Viewpoints Book, 9.
39 Overlie interview, Bogart, Conversations with Anne, 476.
40 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 303; original emphasis.
41 Overlie interview, Bogart, Conversations with Anne, 476.
42 Perucci interview.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Overlie, “Six Viewpoints,” 187–8.
46 Henry Bial articulates this compatibility between postmodernism and performance studies in his Introduction to The Performance Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), 1: “The positive promise of performance studies—its potential to illuminate, instruct, and inspire—is enhanced, not diminished” by its resistance to definition and lack of identifiable essence.