Different Ways of Working, Part I: The Viewpoints

We're moving right along with the semester, studying different tools for and approaches to creating theatre and performance to establish a foundation for our work together with the community on characters from (and eventually a production of) A Perfect Wedding. (By the way, I created a Facebook event for our first reading of the play on October 2. Please post the event on your page, share it with friends, invite people, etc.! We want to encourage as much participation as possible.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, we began by learning The Viewpoints as a tool for building a sense of ourselves as a group working together, and to give us a common vocabulary as we work over the course of the semester. We talked briefly about Mary Overlie's Viewpoints, especially because the extremely democratic foundation for her theory is extremely important to the work we're doing. I wrote about this in the first iteration of this class, and I'll quote myself here in addition to linking to that previous post:

Again, for readers who are unfamiliar with this method of training performers, the Viewpoints came out of Postmodern dance, and were articulated specifically by Mary Overlie. Overlie's original six Viewpoints (Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement and Story) were later adapted by the SITI Company and director Anne Bogart to be used as tools for training actors and creating work for the stage. I have participated in an intensive training with the SITI Company and attended many shorter workshops, and also had the opportunity to work with Mary Overlie when she was briefly in residence at Texas A&M University, where I taught before this.

Essentially, the Viewpoints give actors and directors a common vocabulary from which to work when creating performance--actors engage in improvisations that allow them to have a greater awareness of different aspects of space and time. We have been using the SITI Company's list, which is as follows:

SPACE: spatial relationship, shape, gesture, architecture and topography

and

TIME: kinesthetic response, tempo, duration and repetition.

Part of the reason we are learning the vocabulary in this class is because it allows actors a great deal of agency in staging plays and performances: rather than the director saying, "I want you to go here or do this," the actors are training themselves to have a greater sensitivity to each other and to how they can use different elements of space and time to create meaning.

Both Mary Overlie and the SITI Company emphasize the idea that this is a profoundly democratic tool that is intended to reach for a non-hierarchical relationship. This is one of the reasons it seems useful as a way of building community based performance. In a discussion of how Viewpoints can help directors and actors resist the tendency in American theatre of trying to correctly stage or restage what one person (usually a director) wants to see or hear, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau write

Can the artistic process be collaborative? Can a group of strong-minded individuals together ask what the play or project wants, rather than depending upon the hierarchical domination of one person? Of course a project needs structure, and a sense of direction, but can the leader aim for discovery rather than staging a replica of what s/he has decided beforehand? Can we resist proclaiming "what it is" long enough to authentically ask "what is it?" (The Viewpoints Book 18)

In her essay "The Six Viewpoints" in the collection Training of the American Actor, Mary Overlie extends this collaborative vision to include the audience. She writes that the artistic experimentations of the 1960s and 70s out of which the Viewpoints grew used as their source of information people and things encountered in the everyday world. This shifted the role of the artist from a mystically talented "creator" to a sensitive "observer/participant." She writes,

This creative process, and the art it produced, centered on witnessing and interacting, and, in turn, redefined the role or activity of the audience. The audience, no longer presented with a finite vision from the artist, instead joined the artist as observer/participants. The redefinition of the role of the artist and the relationship of artist to audience created an environment of heightened equality or extreme democracy. (189)

My feeling is that this training is not only good for making us stronger, more focused and creative actors, it also makes us better citizens. I mentioned in class more than once that, in my experience, one of the most important skills Viewpoints training exercises is the ability to actively listen with one's whole body. I've told the students that if they learn nothing else from the class all semester, I hope that they will exercise their ability to really and truly listen, and listen well; conversely, I hope the audience (whose job in this culture is traditionally only to listen) will find ways to be co-creators and participants. Through all of this, I'm hoping that we might all begin to be a stronger, more active community of people.

Over a year later, my feelings about The Viewpoints as a tool that invites creativity, commentary and strong citizenship are the same; but I'm also interested in seeing how audience response might change if community collaborators also learn this vocabulary and use it as a tool for discussion of the social questions raised by the play on which we're working. The method seems particularly relevant as we work on A Perfect Wedding, since Charles Mee works with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company. But also, since the play deals with different cultural ceremonies like weddings and funerals, I think it might be useful to look at the physical elements of space and time in those kinds of ceremonies and see how changing those elements might shift people's understanding of those ceremonies. For example: how are people arranged in space at a wedding, usually? Do women stand in a specific spot? What happens if you change the spatial relationship of people at a wedding along the lines of gender or age? Do our concepts of that institution's meaning change at all? Etc.

I'm excited to hear what the students and others have to say about using the Viewpoints to make and discuss performance as the semester rolls along.