The Constructive Deconstruction of Mary Overlie's Six Viewpoints

Abstract

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.

Although Bogart and Landau claim the necessary authority to bring this “practical guide” into the marketplace, they make no secret of the fact that their work derives from Mary Overlie's innovations. To obfuscate on this point would have been a grave misstep causing outcry from the hundreds of performers who studied with Overlie over the preceding three decades. Many of those students have contested Bogart and Landau's implication that Overlie's purpose on the Experimental Theater Wing faculty was specifically to teach dance. Even giving Bogart and Landau the benefit of the doubt on that point, this acknowledgment alone would raise questions about why these authors feel they have the right to publish the definitive work on Viewpoints training—and why they now list nine viewpoints, which exclude some of the original six. To these questions, Bogart and Landau say:

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.