Tony Perucci

This essay considers the processes of affective attunement in The Viewpoints, Mary Overlie’s theoretical and practical structure for actor training and artistic practice. Developed by Overlie in the interdisciplinary arts scene of New York City’s SoHo district in the 1970s, The Viewpoints operates as an approach to performance, rather than a method, attuning the performer to six key ‘materials’ present in any performance ecology – Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, Story. The Viewpoints approach addresses these materials not as objects for the performer to control, but rather as a practice attune to them as languages being ‘spoken’ by those materials. Through the consideration of simple physical gesture used by Overlie in her teaching, I describe how The Viewpoints pedagogy and practice operates in the minor key – a ‘minor gesture’ for the production of minor gestures that is enabled by the actor as what Overlie calls, ‘The Original Anarchist.’

Alison Jackson’s pre-election photographs of Donald Trump’s “private moments” utilize a look-alike to envision Trump in a number of compromising positions. In ways that exceed the artist’s intention, the photographs’ play of the recognition of misrecognition fosters “ugly feelings” of ressentiment that might enable resistance not only to Trump but also to reactionary Republicans and neoliberal Democrats.

Abstract:Politically engaged theatre has long challenged the theatrical frame that insulates theatre from everyday life. This essay examines recent theatre works that not only play with this tenuous perceptual boundary, but also stage its instability as their primary form of aesthetic political engagement. By repeatedly staging and breaking their framing as being either theatrical fictions or direct political interventions, these “Reality Frictions” willfully irritate the duality fictionality and actuality that Jonas Barish calls theatre’s “ontological queasiness.” Read within the context of debates about the ethics of “para-theater” and the politics of “postdramatic theatre,” the essay analyzes three works of Reality Frictions in European theatre that mobilize their fundamental “indecidability” as a political practice: Chance 2000, German artist Christof Schlingensief’s 1998 “electoral campaign circus”; the Estonian theatre company NO99’s “megaproject” Unified Estonia; and The New Forest, the Dutch theatre collective Wunderbaum’s “fictional platform” for socially engaged art. Through the irritational aesthetics of failure, over-identification, and parafiction, these artists stage the “indecidability” of their works’ fictionality to create a space for a politics of what Derrida terms the “ordeal of the indecidable.”

wurden, die den räumlichen Rahmen für ästhetisierte Landschaftsräume und größere bürgerliche Grabanlagen bereitstellten. Zugleich wurden lange Belegzeiten der Gräber möglich. Die Friedhöfe schufen so die Bühne für eine Inszenierung des Andenkens an die Verstorbenen mit repräsentativen Grabmonumenten. Das Grabmal konnte zu einem Zeichen des Beständigen werden, das über die eigene Endlichkeit hinauswies. Die Angst konnte durch das Bild der „Trauernden“ überwunden werden. Die Erschaffung der idealen Frau trug dazu bei, reizvoll und demütig die Lebenswelt des Mannes, die in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts dominant war, zu kompensieren. Die „Trauernde“ konnte als christlicher Engel, als Madonna, Pietà, mythologischantike Allegorie, Muse, Personifikation oder einfach als profanes Bild der Trauer aufgestellt werden. Immer war sie ein dreidimensionales Objekt, durch das Vorstellungsbilder verdichtet wurden. Auftragssituation, konkrete Akteure und Akteurinnen, die Perspektive der Öffentlichkeit, die der Verstorbenen wie die der Hinterbliebenen spielten hinein und machten die „Trauernde“ zu einem Schlagbild der bürgerlichen Trauerkultur. Beständige Materialien wie Marmor, Bronze oder Galvaniken sollten die Endlichkeit überwinden. Durch den Rückgriff auf bestehende ikonographische Traditionen, ihre Modifizierung und Überformung entstand das Motiv der „Trauernden“, das das Andenken an die Verstorbenen symbolisch und emotional auflud. Die Verknüpfung von Eros und Thanatos hatte in der europäischen Kulturgeschichte eine lange Tradition; in der „Trauernden“ wurde sie in die bürgerliche Grabmalkultur überführt und markierte dabei einen tiefgreifenden Wandel im Umgang mit Trauer, Tod und Endlichkeit. Der Tod schien, wie die Verfasserin feststellt, „mit den sinnlichen Weiblichkeitsbildern und ihren Versprechen auf erinnernde Nachkommenschaft und ewigliches Begehren gemildert“. Das Buch besticht durch gutes Layout und viele farbige Bilder. Auch auf diese Weise werden Text und Visualität verbunden. Die Grabplastiken werden im Bild anschaulich (freilich hätte ein größeres Format die Bilder noch besser zur Wirkung bringen können). Insgesamt ist AnnaMaria Götz ein überzeugendes Buch gelungen, das in der „Trauernden“ visuelle, räumliche und mentalitätshistorische Aspekte zusammenund gemeinsam zum Klingen bringt. Trauer und Tod werden zu einen Thema, an dem sich die gesellschaftlichen Entwicklungen und Veränderungen des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts kristallisieren. Martin Rheinheimer (Odense)

Alison Jackson’s pre-election photographs of Donald Trump’s “private moments” utilize a look-alike to envision Trump in a number of compromising positions. In ways that exceed the artist’s intention, the photographs’ play of the recognition of misrecognition fosters “ugly feelings” of ressentiment that might enable resistance not only to Trump but also to reactionary Republicans and neoliberal Democrats.

The form of actor-training known as The Viewpoints has emerged in recent years from being a relatively unknown practice to become a standard curriculum in actor training programmes, particularly in the US. Originated and developed in the 1970s by the choreographer, dancer and teacher, Mary Overlie, the term ‘Viewpoints’ is most commonly associated with the theatre director Anne Bogart, who has long stated that she ‘stole’ Viewpoints after collaborating with Overlie at New York University in the 1980s. Based on my own training with Overlie, Bogart and SITI Company as well as a study of the two approaches, I argue that the differences of the two methods are so vast and fundamental, that it is more appropriate to say that Bogart did not steal The Viewpoints, so much as she stole their name. While Overlie’s approach consists of a horizontal structure of six performance ‘languages’ which the actor learns to speak with, Bogart’s ‘VPs’ is a hierarchical taxonomy of named elements over which the actor is learned to wield control. Focusing on the two Viewpoints eliminated from Bogart’s figuration – Emotion and Story – I show that Overlie’s radical postmodern approach for the production of ‘Original Anarchists’ has become obscured by Bogart’s ‘efficient’ system for control. While the ‘Viewpoints’ name has no doubt been stolen, The Viewpoints itself cannot have been, as it is an approach constituted by the resistance to capture and control.

This essay considers the processes of affective attunement in The Viewpoints, Mary Overlie’s theoretical and practical structure for actor training and artistic practice.  Developed by Overlie in the interdisciplinary arts scene of New York City’s SoHo district in the 1970s, The Viewpoints operates as an approach to performance, rather than a method, attuning the performer to six key ‘materials’ present in any performance ecology – Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, Story.  The Viewpoints approach addresses these materials not as objects for the performer to control, but rather as a practice attune to them as languages being ‘spoken’ by those materials.  Through the consideration of simple physical gesture used by Overlie in her teaching, I describe how The Viewpoints pedagogy and practice operates in the minor key – a ‘minor gesture’ for the production of minor gestures that is enabled by the actor as what Overlie calls, ‘The Original Anarchist.’

This essay considers the processes of affective attunement in The Viewpoints, Mary Overlie’s theoretical and practical structure for actor training and artistic practice.  Developed by Overlie in the interdisciplinary arts scene of New York City’s SoHo district in the 1970s, The Viewpoints operates as an approach to performance, rather than a method, attuning the performer to six key ‘materials’ present in any performance ecology – Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, Story.  The Viewpoints approach addresses these materials not as objects for the performer to control, but rather as a practice attune to them as languages being ‘spoken’ by those materials.  Through the consideration of simple physical gesture used by Overlie in her teaching, I describe how The Viewpoints pedagogy and practice operates in the minor key – a ‘minor gesture’ for the production of minor gestures that is enabled by the actor as what Overlie calls, ‘The Original Anarchist.’