Mary Overlie

New York University

By Ellen Orenstein

Overlie has had a long and respected career as a performer, choreographer, teacher and theatre collaborator working extensively in the U.S. and Europe. She is a founding teacher at New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing and is writing a book and designing a certificate program for the Six Viewpoints, a performance technique she originated. She has worked with Paul Langland, Nina Martin and Wendell Beavers, who formed her core company from 1976 to 1980, as well as theatre directors Lawrence Sacharow, Lee Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis and Anne Bogart. She is a founder of Danspace at St. Mark’s Church; Movement Research, a dance co-operative nearing its 30th year; and the Pro Series, experimental dance workshops designed for the Tanz Wochen, the summer dance festival of Vienna.

Your classes are not called acting classes; they’re called movement classes or Viewpoints classes. But, they are, in fact, acting classes—how?

I think that it’s acting that has been flipped—over onto its other side. I think that acting as we know it, in Western forms, started with attempts to make what the actor was saying believable to the audience. And so there’s an attempt to mimic real people’s emotions and actions—that part of what we see in people—you know, there’s a lot of stuff about people that we don’t focus on. We focus on their story and how they feel. Acting is filled with these two things—and on a sense of copying.

I have to say that what Stanislavsky achieved—he fills up that history wall to wall. There’s no one else as significant, as in-depth. Because he created such a substantial interior to produce emotion. But it’s still replicated. That’s where the Viewpoints flip—because Viewpoints don’t replicate, they are. Viewpoints are really about the development of awareness—which is a meditative, interactive process—and so, in the incremental development of awareness, one is drawn into dialogue and dialogue is action. And, so, in a certain sense, the idea of internal and external is erased. In Stanislavsky’s approach, there is an internal and there is an external. In the Viewpoints, there is no line like that whatsoever. The line is so erased that it reaches all the way to the audience and back.

Can you give a specific example of what you mean?

Within each of those six materials [the Viewpoints: Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement and Story] is volumes of dialogue—it’s a dialogue that’s natural to human beings. We walk around in space. And how we walk around in space affects us deeply, but we tend not to notice that. The Viewpoints make the actor aware of that—of those things that might typically happen without thought or awareness.

The actor who is not space-aware tends to drift to the center of the stage and stay there—he gets rooted in space. Movement is very clumsy and he doesn’t use blocking except for the most expedient purposes: He wants to sit down, so he crosses the stage to get to the chair. Whereas a Viewpoints actor—well, first of all, just to get him to stand in the middle of the stage would just about kill him, because it’s a very, very odd place of stasis in itself. So the Viewpoints actor will choose where he is going to start the scene spatially and that choice—whether it’s the upper left hand corner of the stage, or wherever it is—that choice is integrated immediately on a psychological, emotional, performative level—he is performing upper left hand corner.

So is there a way that Stanislavsky and Viewpoints can meet?

Oh, absolutely. It’s thrilling. Look at the world of dance: The dancer who has studied ballet, and then Graham, and then contact improvisation, is one mighty interesting person. It used to be thought in the dance world that you couldn’t do that—that they were muscularly, psychologically, alignment-wise, in complete opposition to each other. But that line of thinking belongs to those who are making fortresses around something, for defense and superiority. It turned out to be breathtakingly not true. And I think it is the same with Stanislavsky and the Viewpoints—of course, it’s a better actor who has studied both.

How do you begin to teach the Viewpoints?

Well, the horizontal is so central to the Viewpoints that you can’t have one without the other.

Okay, what is the horizontal? When you walk into a classroom, how does it show up?
First of all, it is not allowed for the teacher to know something that the students must learn. That transference is not allowed in the classroom. The teacher is in the lab with the students—it is a horizontal relationship, not vertical—and there are rules about how to get that established. The teacher must be as exposed, or more, than the students are—as an invitation to neutrality. Right away it removes that the teacher is on any kind of hierarchical level. You are not the final authority. It’s all right for you not to know. You can get discouraged, sad, found, happy, egotistical, opinionated, angry, distracted.

What does a class with you look like?

I arrange myself in an awkward position on the floor, lying on my back with my head propped up by a wall, reading a newspaper. And they come in, and I don’t even say hi to them. And so they’re left trying to figure things out raw, on their own—what this class is about, what the rules are—and that carries on for a number of classes until they realize that there is no authority figure in this room, except themselves.

But you do have knowledge that they don’t have.…

I am a master at setting up situations in which they can have really powerful experiences.

How? Give me an example.

This year, I had a particularly gorgeous group of students—they were just 100 percent wanting to be in that classroom. One of the problems with them was that they were super motivated and super bright, and when you have those two qualities, you expect to ace things. That can get very tricky—managing that. For example, what I wanted them to do was work on a scene which they had already memorized and acted before, and to disregard each other’s timing—which is train-wreck messy—and in the process of struggling with it, they were thrown into a situation where they had to wrestle with the person [in them] who aces things before they have fully confronted the depth of the difficulty—where they could not predict what the learning would be at the end.

Do they look to you after they’ve presented something?

They would—except that I’m not available for that. It’s already set up that I can’t help them. I don’t know. They wouldn’t even think, at that point in the class, of looking to me for the solution. But, what they do look to me for is consolation and solace. Because they’re suffering. And that’s allowed—that’s a given. That kind of suffering we do—it’s not artistic suffering—it’s real miserable groveling. And I just commiserate with them: “That really hurt—that was so ugly.” I don’t have them do it again. I just drop it. And what happens is that they can’t drop it.

So they go home with it—and they come back, two or three classes later, and they say, “Can we try that again?” And I say, “Sure, if you want to.” And, by the second time they’ve decided to return to it themselves, they’ve already taken a massive step—which is, they think they know something, which they’ve put together themselves, that’s going to help them work it out.

For this particular exercise, it took the entire semester. It was bloody. Of course this wasn’t the only thing we did—we did hundreds of things, more than a teacher would normally think to do. I don’t try to filter things to keep them organized. I’m not afraid of chaos, because I’m tracking another type of development that’s not visible: their ability to engage in their own dialogue, in their own experiences, in their own moments, in their own time, and make something happen.

Is there ever a point at which you do discuss goals or results with them?

Yes. It happens usually about three quarters of the way through the semester—late, very late. And the discussion is initiated on the premise of talking with them about how each of them goes about achieving a goal. And, then, there is some analysis about what works in that process for them, and what doesn’t work in that process for them, and what’s inhibiting.

When we start talking about goals, the discussion goes from strategy to, finally, what is the goal. And the goal is the spectacular—and, then, what does spectacular mean, how is spectacular defined, in general and also, specifically, by you in this moment? It’s a very private and very delicate atmosphere in class that day. This is a super-secret talk we’re having; we have to be protected in our effort to project into our most spectacular selves.

Do you have a goal?

(Long pause.) I do. And it’s funny that you should ask that because I actually finished the teaching year kind of scared—my classes were spectacular, and I wondered if I had really taught well. I think that, at this point, the goal of these classes is…that Viewpoints is a process—a very metamorphic process. People get frustrated, I think, a lot, around me and the Viewpoints, because they want to know what they are—and I can’t deliver them. I don’t see them as something that can be delivered in that definable way. The longer I work with them, the less I can deliver them, and the more I want to see people through the metamorphosis that the Viewpoints are and which can produce them in the first place.