Expanded Viewpoints

A 3 to 10-day intense workshop, for 6 to 16 participants, with the opportunity to have a public presentation at the end. The workshop should have a minimum of three days with around 6 hours of working per day. We spend some time working in the rehearsal space or theater provided, and lots of time elsewhere, exploring spaces and themes site -specifically…

Expanded Viewpoints are a way of looking at the component parts that make up TIME and SPACE of everyday life and of performance. We study, play and work with these elements in order to be able to be aware of time and space, to see them more clearly, to experience them more deeply, and to be able to use them more fully in performance, improvisation, and everyday life. Expanded Viewpoints are especially useful for actor / performer training, creating powerful and interesting material for devised theater, and for creating improvised works.

The Viewpoints were originally developed in the 1970’s by American Dancer and Choreographer Mary Overlie, who used her Six Viewpoints for training herself and others, making choreographies, and improvised pieces. Her Viewpoints consist of: Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story (SSTEMS). Mary Overlie said, “The Six Viewpoints deconstruct theater by shifting concentration from the whole to the particular, (it’s) like splitting the atom.”

Anne Bogart (Overlie’s student at NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing) and Tina Landau, along with Anne Bogart’s theater company SITI (NY, USA), adapted Overlie’s viewpoints for their actor training and director-led devised theater work. Their Viewpoints are broken down into the subcategories of viewpoints of time and space: the viewpoints of Time are: Tempo, Duration, Kinesthetic Response, and Repetition. And Space: Shape, Gesture, Architecture, Spatial Relationship and Topography.

After years of practicing and teaching Viewpoints I became interested in developing Viewpoints into a purely improvisational, site grounded form – since there is nothing like that currently in the experimental theater world - unlike the dance based Contact Improvisation and Butoh frameworks that I spent years dabbling in do function like that, along with many others in the alternative dance world. In my research, performance, and teaching I (re)discovered some additional Viewpoints that are useful, that I added to the Expanded Viewpoints framework: in Time:  Stillness / Silence; Musicality; and Timing (Kairos); and in Space: Gaze; Presence; Effort; and Performance / Audience Relationship.

So the complete list of Expanded Viewpoints we work with is: Time: Tempo, Duration, Kinesthetic Response, Stillness / Silence, Musicality, Timing, and Repetition.  And in Space: Shape, Gesture, Gaze, Architecture, Effort, Spatial Relationship, Presence, and Performance / Audience Relationship.

Other ways of working that will be brought into the workshop as supports, warmups and ways to connect the mind, body, voice, and emotions in improvisation: Jonathan Hart's version of Roy Hart Theater's Extended Voicework (in the tradition of Alfred Wolfsohn), and Steve Paxton’s Contact Improvisation which is a playful path of self discovery of our bodies and how they relate to gravity.

 

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