Mary Overlie and the Six Viewpoints

Mary Overlie was my friend and mentor from the day I met her in Fresno, California in 2004. Over the past four years, Mary shared her archive with me, and often daily conversations for my forthcoming book, On the Horizontal: Mary Overlie and the Viewpoints. My book aims to honor her legacy by bringing to a broad audience of practitioners, scholars and students, the integrated theory and practice of Viewpoints actor training, as developed by its originator, Mary Overlie.

In her final years, she allowed me lecture her and teach Viewpoints at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, to train with her at Toneelacadamie Maastricht, and to perform with her in her final work, Brain to Brain at Danspace Project in New York City in September 2019. In that piece, she had me read from the letter she wrote to Sally R. Sommer (published in Dance Scope in 1980) describing her early discoveries in the Viewpoints and the construction of what she termed, her “abstract narratives”:

The experience is witnessed, understood, followed, remembered and yet there is no nameable event that transpired. There is no maiden of the village who falls in love with the prince and goes mad. There are, however, some very engrossing small, odd gestures which dissolve into huge sweeps across the space and then occur again as gestures in a line. All of this may happen in an atmosphere of charged stillness.

I do not feel that I have investigated and identified all the elements present in performance, but that is my constant project.

I am honored to be working with Wendell Beavers, Paul Langland, Nina Martin, Sophia Treanor, Nicolas Norena and so many others to carry on Mary’s constant project: “What is theatre made of?”

Click here to read some of my publications on Mary and The Six Viewpoints.