The Viewpoints and the Secret of the Original Anarchist: Mary Overlie and the Undercommons

Abstract

This article considers actor training in The Viewpoints as a site for the creation of alternative communities and practices beyond the ‘utopia of rules’ that regulates neoliberal culture. I trace what originator Mary Overlie calls Viewpoints’ ‘infectiousness’ through the culminating ‘laboratory’ for Viewpoints study, The Original Anarchist. Overlie’s figure of ‘The Viewpoints Original Anarchist’ trains the actor through what James Scott calls ‘anarchist calisthenics’ and ‘the anarchist squint’. Exemplary of the overall approach of The Viewpoints, The Original Anarchist laboratory trains the performer to discover a collaborative, even deferential relationship to the theatrical materials of Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement and Story ‘on the horizontal’. The Original Anarchist laboratory is rooted firmly in the here and now of attunement, in which the actor’s secret is a practice of what Harney and Moten call ‘study’ prepares the actor for the ‘end’ of Viewpoints training – to ask the question, ‘What is theatre made of?’

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Notes

1 In ‘Irritational aesthetics: Reality friction and indecidable theatre’ (2018), I explore these issues in the context of contemporary European performance.

2 Felton-Dansky’s concluding chapter, which focuses on the ‘open-ended agenda’ and ‘creating perceptual space in the real time of performance’ comes closer to what I think is at play in The Viewpoints (2018: 196).

3 This is the predominant characterization of Dolan’s ‘utopian performative’ (2005: 5–34) and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Muñoz’s ‘utopian performativity’ (2009: 1).

4 As I address in ‘On stealing viewpoints’, Bogart’s use of the term ‘Viewpoints’ to describe her valuable method has precipitated quite a lot of confusion and contestation concerning authorship, attribution and to what 'Viewpoints training' refers. In this essay, when I refer to ‘The Viewpoints’, it is to Overlie’s approach, rather than Bogart’s method, the latter of which I refer to elsewhere as the ‘VPs’. From the early days of her formulation, Overlie has used various names, including ‘The Six Viewpoints’, ‘Viewpoints Theory’, ‘View Points’ and similar variations. I use the proper name of ‘The Viewpoints’ interchangeably with ‘The Six Viewpoints’ when referring to Overlie’s approach as a whole, encompassing its theory and practice. Without the proper article, the ‘Viewpoints’ refers to the six specific SSTEMS materials (Perucci 2017).

5 Wendy Perron (2020) foregrounds this dynamic in the work of the Grand Union, the seminal improvisational dance company that included Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn and Nancy Lewis. Overlie performed with the group in New York (1972) and in one of Rainer’s last performance with the group, In the College (1972).

6 This order is drawn from a 1980 interview by Sally R. Sommer for TDR: The Drama Review’s second ‘Dance Issue’. As Overlie later rechristened some of the six individual Viewpoints, she employed the acronym SSTEMS (Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, Story) – although this order is also arbitrary (Sommer 1980).

7 In On the Horizontal: Mary Overlie and the viewpoints (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), I unpack the full lexicon Overlie utilizes, which includes her idiosyncratic and counterintuitive uses of terms like ‘Emotion’, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘reification’.

8 On the intersection of postmodern dance and civil rights activism, see Danielle Goldman I Want to Be Ready: Improvised dance as a practice of freedom (2010). In On the Horizontal: Mary Overlie and the viewpoints, I address the implications of placing The Viewpoints in the context of the Undercommons’ rootedness in the Black Radical Tradition.

9 On the connections between The Viewpoints and the anarchist-inspired Occupy movement, see my ‘Dog sniff dog: materialist poetics and the politics of the viewpoints’ (2015).

10 In introducing the concept, Scott also mixes his metaphors, recommending the power of ‘anarchist glasses’, which ‘offer a sharper image and better depth of field than most of the alternatives’, which ends up functioning more like an ideological critique (2012: xii).