To Zoom or not to Zoom?
A text for the Patakis Publishers’ blog about their 2020 publication of The Viewpoints Book in Greek
Theatre is the art of live and fast action. Whether actor or director, you have to make quick decisions on the spot and act fast –most of the times. (Yes, we do train for years in order to become actors and directors, and we may prepare for months –even years- for a specific production; but when actually in rehearsal and in performance, quick response and decision-making is key.) Writing about theatre, and about the training of actors and directors, gives one the opportunity to reflect. In the summer of 2020, that opportunity appears surprisingly amply given to us, since the next available chance to rehearse or attend a show is not clearly visible.
Writing from the strange actual moment I am in, I have time to reflect on the Viewpoints technique; and I have an unusual space to practice it: not a rehearsal room or training studio, but an online platform.
I first came to know Viewpoints through a revelatory immersion –when auditioning for the Columbia University MFA Directing Program in 2005. Everything was new anyway –crossing the Atlantic, being in New York City- but the immersive experience of being in the room with 29 other candidates and legendary director Anne Bogart, the founder of the famous technique, topped all other levels of newness.
Viewpoints is a philosophy translated into a technique that deals with the fundamental questions any theatre artist faces: time and space. It is used for training performers, for ensemble building and for generating movement for the stage. Viewpoints is points of awareness that any theatre artist makes use of while working. Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, the authors of The Viewpoints Book (the Greek translation of which, published last February, I have the honor to sign), when describing their experience of coming into Viewpoints themselves, say that they felt that “the world had been named.” Through their theatre-making and teaching over the past few decades, they have made of Viewpoints a rehearsal and training language that has marked the development of numerous theatre artists around the world.
Tadashi Suzuki, the great Japanese director (and close collaborator of Anne Bogart), in an effort to identify theatre’s uniqueness, has said that it “offers a live communal space” –in this over-digitized world of ours. As of August 2020, the live communal space Suzuki talks about is only available online –not in a room. One of the gifts of Viewpoints is that it teaches you to play off what you are given. It forces you to utilize (and value) limitations. The question then arises: as I am preparing to conduct my first virtual Viewpoints workshop, am I applying the Viewpoints principle of utilizing limitations or am I actually destroying, playing against the basis of theatre –the “live communal space” Suzuki talks about?
I turn to Anne and Tina, who write: “We’d all love an answer, a guarantee, a shortcut. […] It’s deadly for any artist to mechanically try to follow the steps without wrestling with the questions, adjusting the process, and earning their own discoveries.” (And in this they remind us of Plato’s insistence on the absolute primacy of the living word over the dead letter.)
In hopes that this “new normal” would not last forever, let’s try for now to practice Viewpoints (and theatre, for that matter) online. Life will (should) eventually go back to normal. Or not really? Heraclitus says that no one enters the same river twice. Then we risk being tempted by the idea that theatre can, in fact, be replaced by online platforms!...
In my foreword to the Greek edition (written several months before the pandemic) I was inviting fellow practitioners and theoreticians alike to a dialogue around the way we practice our art. The current circumstances offer even more so the opportunity for that type of a conversation –and reflection.
One more reflection from the strange current moment:
Our collective tank of visual experiences is inevitably filled with screen (film, television, social media etc.) data, since these are the media by and large prevailing in our every day life and entertainment. However, when you actually enter the room to stage a show or when you sit down to attend a performance, you are automatically reminded that the experience of watching or generating theatre is closer to dance than film. There is no camera to move around –there are only bodies.
Mary Overlie, iconic choreographer, performer, teacher at the Experimental Theater Wing of Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and the inventor of the Six original Viewpoints, on whose theory and teachings her student Anne Bogart based her own technique and philosophy, passed away on June 5th.
It is refreshing, precisely at this moment in time, as we keep on ‘Zooming’, to (re)discover the striking simplicity of Overlie’s fundamental approach to structuring dance improvisation:
“The seed of the entire work of The Six Viewpoints is found in the simple act of standing in space. From this perspective the artist is invited to read and be educated by the lexicon of daily experience. The information of space, the experience of time, the familiarity of shapes, the qualities and rules of kinetics in movement, the ways of logic, how stories are formed, the states of being and emotional exchanges that constitute the process of communication between living creatures ... Working directly with these materials the artist begins to learn of performance through the essential languages as an independent intelligence.” (Overlie)