Working with the Viewpoints

Brian Jucha

VIEWPOINT: n: POINT OF VIEW, STANDPOINT.

POINT OF VIEW: a position from which something is considered or evaluated.

STANDPOINT: n: a position from which objects or principles are viewed and according to which they are compared and judged.

- Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary

Viewpoints at work

It would be impossible to imagine any kind of artistic being without the Viewpoints as an integral part of my sensibility. As a student and collaborator of Mary Overlie, Anne Bogart, and Wendell Beavers, since I was a freshman at NYU's Experimental Theater Wing - the Viewpoints are the very foundation on which I approach the theater, film, and video work that I do today.

It is my firmest belief that all great artists utilize Viewpoints. The only difference is that those who know them have been blessed with the vocabulary to recognize, share, and 'point at' real, identifiable concepts when working.

In 1989, while at Trinity Rep in Providence, RI, I remember director Robert Woodruff had come to direct a now-infamous production of Brecht's Baal.

The students in the conservatory - many of who later became the resident actors of my company Via Theater - were captivated in excitement about the Viewpoints. I had been working with Woodruff as an actor and clearly remember the day that he asked me just exactly what the hell these Viewpoints were? Having already been working with him, it was clear that Woodruff used the Viewpoints instinctually in his work as a director. He just didn't call them by name.

"It's difficult to describe working with the Viewpoints in words. It's like breaking the barriers of your mind and letting your body follow. It's changed the way I approach work more than anything else. Particularly if you're working on something very structured like a film, for instance - to find freedom within the structure is very challenging." - Lisa Welti, actor

History

My memory of the development of Viewpoints theory is they were created as "The Six Viewpoints" by Mary Overlie in 1977 and taught to me by Wendell Beavers as SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS, SHAPE, GESTURE, KINESTHETIC RESPONSE, NARRATIVE (story), and REPETITION. Anne Bogart began to develop the theory for use in theater and replaced NARRATIVE with ARCHITECTURE in the belief that stories were inherent in the theater.

In 1993, Mary Overlie told me that these named six viewpoints I and many others had been working with for some fifteen years were incorrect and that the Viewpoints were conceived of and have always been SPACE, STORY, TIME, EMOTION, MOVEMENT, and SHAPE (with the mnemonic STEMSS). Meanwhile, around this same time, Anne Bogart, in her work with the SITI Company, was creating an extension of her understanding of the original six viewpoints to include three new concepts: TEMPO, DURATION, and TOPOGRAPHY.

So, what does it all boil down to?

Viewpoints Theory is a set of definable and recognizable tools from which we can create work and have the vocabulary to discuss it. The concepts extend from the fact that there are two givens in any performance situation, whether it be theater, dance, performance, film, or video.

We have SPACE. We have TIME.

The Viewpoints that I work with today can all be identified as subsets of these two global concepts.

"We have very little craft to give to each other, but SPACE is one of the powers with which we are working, and it is a power. Wegman said, "I leap, and space crackles around me." You have a companion in space or you have an enemy. It's how you want to take it. If you familiarize yourself with what SPACE can do to you and for you in your design of what you are doing - the space is the counterpart and don't forget it. It is. There's nothing you can do about it. It is. - Bessie Schonberg

SPACE: Relationship, Shape, Architecture, Topography, Gesture (both expressive and behavioral)

"Time is on my side." - The Rolling Stones

TIME: Repetition, Duration, Tempo, Kinesthetic Response

The individual artist can take what is useful and resonates for them. That is what it is all about, after all. What works for us in the creation of our work?

Whose point of view anyway?

I have a unique experience in my absorption of all the individual nuances of working with the Viewpoints. My history comes from learning them first from Mary Overlie and Wendell Beavers and then spending years fine-tuning them according to Anne Bogart as an actor. It wasn't until recently when I asked Mary Overlie to choreograph a ballroom dance for Via Theater's I fell off the mountain... that I truly understood the scope of how one can approach the ideas and how important they are to the director/choreographer as well as to the performer.

Viewpoints can be utilized to empower performers working on stage. Anne Bogart now compares actor training with Viewpoints to a pianist practicing scales on the piano. No actor trained in the Viewpoints will ever find themselves on a stage, not knowing what to do.

Viewpoints can also be applied to what an audience member experiences sitting in a theater. What does a spectator experience watching a performance? Mary Overlie refers to this part of the theory as "perceptual potentials."

"They experience SPACE (ability to perceive physical relationship). They experience STORY (ability to perceive and collect information over a period of time and make conclusions). They experience TIME (ability to perceive duration and systems designed to regulate duration). They experience EMOTION (ability to perceive states of feeling and to be put into states of feeling). They experience MOVEMENT (ability to identify through memory kinetic states). They experience SHAPE (ability to respond to form)." - Mary Overlie

For sixteen years, my truth of the Viewpoints was from standing on stage and relating to other performers through space and time. My new understanding has expanded to give thought to a spectator sitting in an audience and perceive Viewpoints during a given performance event.

Chaos, Confusion, and Responsibility

"The Viewpoints are invaluable to all actors regardless of what kind of genre you're working in. The most important aspect of them is learning to listen to your body and the internal clues it's giving you in terms of the structure of a scene. I know after working with the Viewpoints I can look at a "conventional" scene and break it down into beats much easier. You learn to turn off the intellect a bit and just feel the rhythms of the scene and once a sense of rhythm is there the emotions just follow." - Kristen Lee Kelly, actor

The concept of Viewpoint training has become a buzzword in higher theater education and actor training. The intrinsic problem I have encountered is that many educators are dispersing the vocabulary without having a clear understanding of how to utilize the Viewpoints and therefore confusing students. The Viewpoints by nature seem elusive only because they are SO SIMPLE. Yet, unless they are demonstrated to students, they can have more of a confusing effect on how they can best serve the work.

Each Viewpoint must be dissected and examined to be understood. I remember Mary Overlie saying at the 1998 Viewpoints conference that a total understanding of the Viewpoints can be a life's work. I've worked with them for years and still discover new things about them in every rehearsal and every class.

Recently, while working with the upperclassman at the Theater Department at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania - who had already had some exposure to Viewpoints vocabulary - I asked the students to write down their questions about the Viewpoints:

How can Viewpoints be used when dealing with set choreography and direction? Are Viewpoints most useful when rehearsing and improvising before anything is set? Whose Viewpoint is it anyway? How do Viewpoints integrate into traditional scenes? Is it possible to use a combination of the Viewpoints and another style in the same piece - will it disrupt the style? Aren't the Viewpoints more important for a director to utilize since they are the ones who must be concerned with the look and feel of the entire work? Do actors only need to know them to be able to converse with a director versed in Viewpoints?

Do you use the Viewpoints more in relation to others or within yourself? When do you know when creating a piece which Viewpoints hold more value in association with the piece?

Do the Viewpoints create structure on an improvisationally based experimental theater? If so, is Viewpoints still experimental and improvisation based? Does it become its own type of theater? As a director, how do you use the Viewpoints to make a complete show? How do you begin to "think" about using the Viewpoints when directing a play? How do you incorporate emotion using text without Method?

Hmmm.

I find it interesting that there seems to be a predilection that the Viewpoints do not or cannot be applied to scene work or traditional plays. They can. Do we not - even in a naturalistic couch play - experience space and time? Why can't an actor work with intention, character, or action and still be aware of their spatial relationships? What if this physical awareness is simultaneously allowed to inform the interior life of the performer? What revelations might occur?

The majority of the work that I create is physically based - but that says more about my interest in multi-disciplinary work and the influence of some great choreographers on my work than it does about using the Viewpoints.

If you look at the quotes from the Via Theater company actors throughout this article, you will note that these performing experts in the Viewpoints all talk about the physical life awareness that the Viewpoints have brought to their work as performers. Their physical awareness is as sharp as their internal lives on stage. This is not to say that the internal riches of their performances are not as important as their physical consciousness. They are partners.

Why do many believe that the style of work using Viewpoints is always abstract or physical theater? Why do many believe that text and Viewpoint work do not go hand in hand? Yes, there are text-driven dramas, and there are non-linear performance works: but these are two different types of work that can benefit equally from a knowledge of the Viewpoints.

The beauty of the Viewpoints is that they are EXACTLY what they say they are. They are as common sense as you can get. They are simply tools for artists to communicate.

Creating work with the Viewpoints

"The Viewpoints allow an actor to create a 'physical' script, an invaluable asset when conventional means of entering a theatrical world are difficult financially or emotionally. They are the finest enhancement an impossible text, begrudging character, or totally inappropriate song can be blessed by." - Megan Spooner, Actor

So, how do I create work using the Viewpoints?

Viewpoints improvisation is an art form unto itself. As mentioned earlier, they are the actor's scales that can be practiced to create a more fully rounded, equipped, focused - and ultimately - interesting performer.

Some of the most memorable and profound theatrical moments in my work have come from Viewpoints improvisation. Viewpoints work can generate material. Viewpoints improv begins to tell stories and develop identifiable relationships. Stage pictures can be created. Unforgettable images that you may never in a million years have thought of can suddenly appear before you. Characters and themes can be introduced to elicit exploration and research on the subject of a given work. Theatrical riddles and puzzles can be solved.

The performance of work created using Viewpoints is automatically more on edge, more focused, more driven, more surprising, more dangerous. Those horrifying moments in live performance when something goes wrong - we've all been there - the late sound cue, the missing prop: I have to say, those moments, which once ripped at my insides as a director sitting in an audience, are now the funniest, entertaining, and exhilarating when you have a group of performers who have created a piece out of the Viewpoints.

They can respond immediately, without hesitation or fear. And it is those moments - as Anne Bogart would say - when anything can happen on stage (and usually does) - that are by far the most enlightening.

The art of creating work using the Viewpoints is in deciding what to keep and what to throw away.

An actor's humorous shortcuts to working with the Viewpoints

"When in doubt:

  1.  Make a diagonal
  2. Be someone's shadow
  3. See a gesture someone's making onstage - repeat it - either simultaneously or in canon
  4. Find a pillar - use it
  5. Find a corner - use it ("corners are poetic")
  6. Stand "too" close or "too" far from the person you're talking to
  7. Walk purposefully from one side of the stage to the other
  8. Lie upside down on a staircase - works best if you don't have to speak
  9. "Get off the floor!"
  10. Do something else unless brian says "that's a keeper"
  11. After the staging is set - JUSTIFY IT! (of course this is the most important of all)"

- Sheryl Dold, actor

Begin

Today, as part of my working process, it is a given that any actor that I work with must become an expert in working with the Viewpoints. Craft in working with Viewpoints creates instant ensemble. They are the essence of a kind of non-verbal communication and understanding of how I see a performance space and how I expect a performer to be in tune with the space in which he is performing.

Viewpoints are not that mysterious. They are what they say they are. Viewpoints cannot be forced. They already exist in a performance situation by the very nature of our existence in the realm of SPACE and TIME.

The audience experiences them. The actor's life exists inside of them.