Viewpoints, creativity and embodied learning: developing perceptual and kinaesthetic skills in non-dancers studying undergraduate university drama

Abstract

Viewpoints are a structural approach to training and directing for theatre. Originating from the innovative, inventive and exploratory approach of Mary Overlie and the self-confessed scavenger approach of Anne Bogart, Viewpoints offers a practical philosophy of working. As a training approach it begins with a disciplined engagement of the body in space and time. The tangible elements of the Viewpoints provide a set of tasks on which the student can focus, thus freeing the imagination and spirit to create. Yet at the same time the systematic logic of Viewpoints supports novice practitioners to begin to question their perception, invest in creative practice that demands action and exploration, and to deconstruct, re-organise and rebuild scores and sequences in the pursuit of theatre that is visceral and visual. This essay reports on undergraduate student experiences of learning Viewpoints. It interrogates the demands of embodied learning of the movement/structural system on non-dancers and examines student-actor experiences of embodied learning from multiple of subject positions – observer/participant/creator/reflector/actor.

Keywords::

• Viewpoints
• embodied practice
• physical training
• movement training for non-dancers

Notes

^1. SSTEMS is Overlie's organisation of her intuitive embodied approach to studio teaching and devising in dance. She went on to develop SSTEMS, to produce award-winning theatre through the 1980s and to teach it internationally.

^2. Scott Cummings (2005, p. 221) alludes to the ongoing contention surrounding the origin and ownership of the methodology within the USA.

^3. Bogart and Overlie (2011, n.p.) tells how after a brief engagement with the six viewpoints of Overlie's SSTEMS she went on to adapt, amend and extend them into the nine Viewpoints she is renowned for inventing. She states ‘Mary is an innovator and an inventor … she goes into herself and comes out with something truly original. Me, I am a scavenger [… I] pull it all together and get on with it.’

^4. I was first introduced to Viewpoints by Lynne Bradley and Simon Woods of Zen Zen Zo Theatre Company in Brisbane, Australia. Bradley and Woods are credited with bringing Viewpoints to Australia after training with Bogart at SITI Company in the 1990s.

^5. For the full articulation see The Viewpoints Book (Bogart and Ladau 2005).

^6. Offered within the Specialist Elective strand (university administrative code: RA2S016, RA3S012 and RA3S013) Viewpoints is delivered to a mixed cohort of second and third year students as a learning space that might be considered somewhat of an incubator or laboratory space to engage in a specialist area of drama and performance.

^7. In Joan Herrington's (2000, p. 153) article on directing with Viewpoints there is a focus on Viewpoint's utility as an approach. She writes that it ‘has become a training tool, a staging tool, an “everything” tool’.

^8. Bogart and Landau offer a range of physical exercises drawn from drama, fitness training, yoga, etc., which can be accessed in detail in chapter 4 of The Viewpoints Book (Bogart and Landau 2005). In my classes I employ drills derivative of my own training in Viewpoints in 2002 with Zen Zen Zo, Brisbane Australia and other activities from my various trainings informed by Lecoq's The Moving Body (documented in Lecoq, Carasso, & Lallias 2002) and Dymphna Callery's Through the Body (2001).

^9. Climenhaga (2010, p. 298) describes kinaesthetic response as ‘an awakening of physical and visceral connection where you feel the appropriate action to take and respond before you have the chance to intellectualise the consequences of your action’.

^10. When I teach topography, or in the terminology I use, floor pattern, I draw on kinaesthetic and visual metaphors to instruct. Walk about the space, you are aware of those around you, you are aware of the architecture, take your attention now to how you navigate the space, what is your navigational pathway? If your feet left brightly coloured footprints for you to retrace at a later date, what picture are your feet painting on the floor?

^11. In order to effectively maximise the students' experience and their scope for feelings of achievement and success, the module is designed to be delivered intensively with three classes each week (two hours, one hour and two hours) to ensure adequate attention is able to be paid to building physical fitness, endurance and acuity with each element, while at the same time ensuring spaces for integrating feedback, reading and reflection, and recovery.

^12. Neuroscience links creativity to our ‘ability to generate in one's brain (the association cortex), novel concerns and representations that elicit associations with symbols and principles of order’ (Pfenninger and Shubik 2001, p. 235).

^13. Sats here described by Eugenio Barba in his book The Paper Canoe ‘The sats is the moment in which the action is thought/acted by the entire organism, which reacts with tension, even in immobility, it is the point in which one decides to act’ (1995, pp. 55–56). As Barba puts it ‘It is the spring before the sprung’ (1995, p. 56).

^14. My objective is to create a learning environment that will support students to learn how they learn. Establishing clear structures within which the learner undertakes physical performance training supports them to negotiate and bypass critical barriers, which can later be referred to within reflective feedback modes. In this way, students come to better understand how they learn and the conditions that are required to support their own learning.

^15. Deep learning is when ‘the intention to extract meaning produces active learning processes that involve relating ideas and looking for patterns and principles on the one hand (a holist strategy – Pask, 1976, 1988), and using evidence and examining the logic of the argument on the other (serialist) … The approach also involves monitoring the development of one's own understanding (Entwistle, McCune & Walker, 2000)’ (cited Entwistle 2000, p. 3).