Performance Research A Journal of the Performing Arts ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20 On Stealing Viewpoints Tony Perucci To cite this article: Tony Perucci (2017) On Stealing Viewpoints, Performance Research, 22:5, 113-124, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2017.1384188 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1384188 Published online: 19 Dec 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 79 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rprs20 On Stealing Viewpoints TONY PERUCCI Mary Overlie is an observer/participant, (NYU’s) Experimental Theatre Wing (ETW) a deconstructing postmodern theatre practitioner, studio incorporated them into their theatre an original anarchist. She is a woman who is not practice. However, the increasing currency of afraid of obscurity, or worried that being unknown the ‘Viewpoints’ name in recent years is largely might obscure her ideas … The Six Viewpoints is due to its popularization by the acclaimed her child. Mary Overlie, Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints theatre director Anne Bogart, through her Theory & Practice (2016c: 198) well-known work with SITI Company and their regular training ‘intensives’, as well as As she admits freely and often, Anne Bogart stole the 2005 publication of Anne Bogart and Tina the Viewpoints from Mary Overlie, a postmodern Landau’s The Viewpoints Book: A practical dancer and choreographer from Montana who came to New York in 1971. guide to viewpoints and composition. Bogart has Scott Cummings, Remaking American Theatre: long boasted of having ‘stolen’ the Viewpoints Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and the SITI Company from Overlie during her brief time teaching (2006: 110) at ETW, the studio that Overlie had helped You do not take work from someone else and use to found. While Bogart has claimed to have the name and claim to have developed the work ‘expanded’ Overlie’s ‘dance’ system and ‘applied’ calling it the same name and, in addition, adding it to theatre, her approach is so fundamentally 1 For the sake of clarity, insult, never really having studied the work. different from Overlie’s longstanding I will refer to Overlie’s Mary Overlie, Correcting a Profound and Tragic formulation that it is curious that Bogart would system as ‘The Viewpoints’ Mistake (2016a: 6) and Bogart’s (and adopt the term ‘Viewpoints’ for her system Landau’s) as the ‘VPs’. To Contemporary theatre is having a ‘Viewpoints’ at all. As Overlie puts it, Bogart’s approach my knowledge, neither moment.1 Commonly known as the ‘postmodern Bogart nor other members operates through an entirely different logic, of SITI Company use this response to Method Acting’, Viewpoints has constituting a ‘system [that] cannot possibly term. However, I use it here become ‘ubiquitous’ as it has found ‘adherents stand as “The Viewpoints”’ (2016a: 5). I contend to distinguish the two approaches. In this essay, throughout the industry’ (Loewith 2012). that it would be more accurate to say that Bogart ‘The Viewpoints’ refers to Originated and developed in the 1970s by the stole the Viewpoints in name only, a theft yjat Overlie’s SSTEMS system, ‘Viewpoints’ (without an choreographer, dancer and teacher Mary Overlie has allowed that name to come to describe an article) refers to the in the vibrant arts scene of New York City’s easily consumable commodity and not Overlie’s materials themselves in either approach, while the SoHo district, The Viewpoints articulates a shift radical intervention. ‘VPs’ refers to the from traditionally ‘hierarchical’ approaches to In this essay, I describe Overlie’s approach constructed by Bogart and Landau and theatre that privilege plot and character to one conceptualization of The Viewpoints as a disseminated in trainings that makes ‘horizontal’ the theatrical materials performance practice of what Deleuze and led by SITI Company and Steppenwolf Theater. of Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement Guattari call a minor form. That is, The Overlie has used all and Story. Viewpoints operates as a practice of variations of ‘The Viewpoints’ The ‘Viewpoints’ name was long unfamiliar deterritorializing the fixed terms of what interchangeably over the to most American actors, even as Tectonic Overlie calls ‘solid state theatre’ to produce a years: The View Points, The Six Viewpoints, Theater Project’s Moises Kaufman and other ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’ in theatre Viewpoint Theory and so of Overlie’s students at New York University’s and dance (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 18). on. PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 22·5 : pp.113-124 ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online 113 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1384188 © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group PR 22.5 On Names.indd 113 10/12/2017 15:30 In so doing, The Viewpoints works to free minor key of ‘particle-ization’, but in the major theatre’s and dance’s materials, performers and key of instrumentalization. It does so by audiences from what she calls the ‘domination capturing and deploying ‘Time’ and ‘Space’ as [of] hierarchical control’ (Overlie 2004). It is ‘order words’ for what Bogart describes as what Overlie terms the ‘infectious impact’ of a director’s ‘shorthand’ for telling actors what to The Viewpoints that provides the conditions of ‘fix’ in their performance (Deleuze and Guattari possibility for Bogart’s ‘funny little machine’, 1987: 106; Bogart 2005: 212). which Overlie describes as a wholly different As valuable a machine-system as the VPs 2 The ‘brief history’ on the ‘system that wasn’t mine’ (2016c: 197). As may be, the Viewpoints themselves cannot Steppenwolf West website states that Overlie a result of Bogart’s name-theft, ‘Viewpoints’ has have been stolen from Overlie, as The originated the Viewpoints become a taxonomy of the major, standardizing Viewpoints represents an attempt to name as a means of communicating with her a new form of actor training, which obscures the what is impossible to steal: the resistance to ‘dance troupe.… In the potential of a different kind of machine capture, to being stolen. In contrast to the VPs’ early 1970s Ann [sic] altogether – Overlie’s abstract machine, which Bogart adopted them’ instrumentality, The Viewpoints enact a form of (‘Viewpoints’ 2016). After produces and is produced by ‘the fragility and what James Scott terms ‘anarchist calisthenics’ Bogart and Landau chose persistence of the minor gesture … [that leads] for the production and development of The to ‘add 3 more’, Landau taught them to Billings the event elsewhere than toward government Viewpoints actor, that is, Overlie’s ‘Original who has now ‘tailored the fixity of the major’ (Manning 2016: 7). Anarchist’ (2012: 1). While this name-theft VPs in a way that opens up the emotional truth of the Bogart’s appropriation of the ‘Viewpoints’ occludes the visibility of The Viewpoints’ minor actor’ in such courses as name has established it as the ‘major’ form of gesture, disenfranchising Overlie in multiple ‘Viewpoints for the Camera’ (ibid.). ‘her System with a capital “S”’ (Loewith 2012). ways, this form of domination is characteristic 3 My own understanding of The term is now so common in actor training of the minor-major relationship, where the the Viewpoints is shaped that it is even abbreviated as the ‘VPs’ in ‘minor gets cast aside, overlooked, or forgotten by extensive training and relationships with both audition and scene study courses for Hollywood in the major chords’ (Manning 2017:1). Overlie and SITI Company. actors, such as those taught in Los Angeles at However, it is in the ways that The Viewpoints I was first introduced to them during a two-week Steppenwolf Classes West by Alexandra Billings, are not major, operate at the fringes and in the course held in June 2004 a star of the Amazon TV series Transparent. As interstices of the major, as well as even in the held at California State University, Fresno. The a major performance practice, Bogart intends subversion and unmaking of the major, that lies workshop was organized by for the VPs not to challenge norms, but to its infectious potentiality.3 professors Tanya Kayne-Perry and Karen produce a new normativity for theatre to Schaffman where I was contest the hegemony of Method Acting in THE VIEWPOINTS: THE STORY OF part of a small group of American actor training, which she describes as university students, faculty A NAME IN TWO KEYS and independent artists the ‘misguided … Americanization of who studied for one week Stanislavski’ that has inhibited theatrical Minor key (a small dance) with Mary Overlie (and her long-time collaborator innovation by ‘overemphasizing personlized Mary Overlie’s entry into The Viewpoints is Nina Martin), followed by emotional circumstances’ (Bogart 2001: 36; a reckoning with Space, in no small part because one week with Anne Bogart 2 and two members of SITI Bogart and Landau 2005: 16). Theatre artists of the ways in which the places where she lived Company (Will ‘Bondo’ and acting teachers alike now generally during its development gave rise to the theory Bond and Barney O’Hanlon). Since that understand the ‘Viewpoints’ in the major terms itself. Having grown up in Montana, Overlie summer, I have of the VPs’ ‘clear-cut procedure and attitude’, ‘ran away from home’ in 1964, jumping a freight participated in numerous SITI Company trainings, with Bogart and Landau’s The Viewpoints Book train with $50 in her pocket to eventually including (in 2006) their providing a ‘step-by-step recipe’ for producing arrive in Berkeley, California. As a small-town annual residential four-week intensive at this new normativity (2005: back cover). girl and a lover of classical music and ballet, Skidmore College in Bogart’s ‘efficient’ system has largely effaced Overlie felt alienated from the counterculture Saratoga Springs, New York.