|
Mary Overlie Mary Overlie (January 15, 1946 – June 5, 2020) was an American choreographer, dancer, theater artist, professor, author, and the originator of the Six Viewpoints technique for theater and dance. The Six Viewpoints technique is both a philosophical articulation of postmodern performance and a teaching system addressing directing, choreographing, dancing, acting, improvisation, and performance analysis.[1] The Six Viewpoints has been taught in the core curriculum of the Experimental Theater Wing within Tisch School of the Arts at New York University since its inception (1978).[2] Overlie was the co-founder of several long lasting art institutions such as Danspace Project, the Studies Project, Movement Research, and the Experimental Theater Wing at New York University.[1] Her choreography, both solo and for Mary Overlie Dance Company (1978-1986), has toured extensively through Europe and has been performed in New York at the Holly Solomon Gallery, The Kitchen Center for Music, Video and Dance, St. Mark's Danspace, Dance Theater Workshop, The Museum of Modern Art and numerous lofts in New York.[1] Overlie received two Bessie Achievement Awards, the first for creating the Studies Project, shared with Wendell Beavers, and the latter for her life-time contribution to dance. She collaborated with Lee Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis, David Warrilow, Ruth Maleczech, Anne Bogart, Yvonne Rainer, and Barbara Dilley.[2] Life and career1950-1960sMary Overlie was born in Eastern Montana. She moved to Bozeman at the age of six, where she came under the influence of Gennie DeWeese (d. 2007), and Robert DeWeese (d.1990). As modernist painters, Gennie and Robert DeWeese were notable and influential members of the development of the Montana contemporary arts community, which included potters Rudy Autio and Peter Voulkos, sculptors James Reineking and Deborah Butterfield, and writer Robert Pirsig of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.[3] For Overlie, Montana's raw and minimal landscape combined with her relationship to Robert and Gennie DeWeese inspired her inquiry into the materials of performance. The question "what are dance and theater made of?", would over the years develop into the Six Viewpoints, Overlie's technical language to discuss the artistic form of performance parallel to the specific language used to describe painting.[4] Overlie began her dance training in ballet and improvisation with teacher Harvey Jung (former member of New York Opera Ballet Company) in Robert DeWeese's studio on Main Street in Bozeman. Throughout her teens, Overlie studied theater, dance, and visual art and immersed herself in the Montana arts community until in 1962 she moved to Berkeley, California by way of freight train.[5] In the Bay Area of California and at Connecticut College, Overlie studied Martha Graham technique with David Wood, Merce Cunningham technique with Margaret Jenkins, and José Limón technique with Anne Swearingen and Betty Jones. Additionally, Overlie studied Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, becoming a Transcendental Meditation teacher in 1968. The teachings of Transcendental Meditation would later influence the philosophical foundations of the Six Viewpoints, specifically as a process of refinement for conscious awareness[6] During her years in San Francisco, Overlie danced with the Anne Swearingen Dance Company, the Teresa Dickensen Dance Company, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the Jan Lapiner Dance Company. She later performed in works choreographed by Yvonne Rainer and Barbara Dilley, founders of the Grand Union.[1] 1970-1980sIn 1969, Dilley invited Overlie to make a performance for the Whitney Museum in New York City as a part of her improvisational dance company, Natural History of the American Dancer. Overlie arrived in SoHo in January 1970 while assisting Yvonne Rainer in her research and workshop tour in preparation for Rainer's film Lulu.[citation needed] Overlie continued as a member of the Natural History of the American Dancer with Carmen Beauchat, Cynthia Hedstrom, Judy Padow, Rachel Lew and Suzanne Harris from 1970 to 1975. The company performed at The Whitney Museum, 112 Greene St. Gallery, Ornette Coleman's Artist's House, Paula Cooper Gallery, Bennington College, Oberlin College and other venues. In 1972, Overlie began experimenting with the early explorations of Steve Paxton, founder of Contact Improvisation. From 1975 to 1979, Overlie danced with the Judy Padow Dance Company before she started her own company and work as a soloist.[1] In 1974, Overlie cofounded Danspace Project, a dance-presenting organization, at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery with New York School poet Larry Fagin [9] and choreographer Barbara Dilley.[7] In 1977, Overlie choreographed and performed Window Pieces, Glassed Imaginations and Glassed Imaginations II at the Holly Solomon Gallery, 112 Greene Street, Manhattan. The pieces were performed in the storefront windows of the gallery to audiences on the sidewalk of New York's SoHo neighborhood. Ron Argelander invited her to join him as the first teacher of the Experimental Theater Wing of Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.[2] Sylvère Lotringer interviewed Overlie for Semiotext(e) edition Notes on the Schizo-Culture Issue (1979) alongside Jack Smith, Philip Glass, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Robert Wilson, John Cage and other leading philosophers and artists "that had already devoted their thought to the perpetual collapsing of borders."[8] This interview posited Overlie as notable exponent of post-modernism.[9] The Mary Overlie Dance Company (founded 1978), included original members Paul Langland, Wendell Beavers, and Nina Martin. The company performed Overlie's choreographies, some notable works include: Painter's Dream (1978),[10] Hero (1979) partially scored by Laurie Anderson,[11] History (1983)[12] and Wallpaper (1983), all performed at The Kitchen. Adam and Eve (1983)[13] presented at Dance Theater Workshop, and The Figure (1979)[14] performed at the Museum of Modern Art.[1] In 1978, Overlie co-founded "The School for Movement Research & Construction", now Movement Research, a non-profit organization that offers dance classes, workshops, residencies and performance opportunities for artists in New York City. Its focus is on improvisation, post-modern dance, and experimentation.About Us [1] Seminal to Overlie's career is an enduring association with Mabou Mines Theater Company. She contributed choreography and staging for director Lee Breuer's Saint and the Football Players (1974),[15] David Warrilow's The Lost Ones (1979), written for him by Samuel Beckett and presented at The Public Theater, and Red Beads (2000) presented at Mass MoCA. Her work with Mabou Mines also included collaborations with director JoAnne Akalaitis on the theatrical productions Cascando (1977), Dressed Like an Egg (1978), and Dead End Kids (1983) at The Public Theater.[16] Other notable stage collaborations included those with Anne Bogart, founder of the SITI Company, on the productions Artouist (1984) and South Pacific (1986). Via these collaborations, she introduced Bogart to the Six Viewpoints, which Bogart later adapted to design the training and directorial work of the SITI Company.[17] Late 1980s and 1990sFrom 1984 through 1998, Overlie was working in Europe as an educator, choreographer and performer.[1] She was the director of the Experimental Theater Wing Paris program from 1985 to 1987 and by invitation oversaw the creation of the Pro Series Internationale Tanz Wochen Wien in Vienna, Austria (1989) where she met and organized workshops taught by Susanne Linke, Karine Saporta, Ismael Ivo, and Merce Cunningham among others. The Pro Series, now called ImPulsTanz Festival, invites world-renowned choreographers to teach workshops and choreograph experimental works in progress on students of the Internationale Tanz Wochen Wien.[2] She was a resident choreographer at ETW Paris, where she developed Skies over America (1986) and at the European Dance Development Center in Arnhem, Holland, where she developed Country (1992) and Dances for Prepared Bodies (1996). She toured performing her solo-pieces Small Dance (1989), History (1997), and Location of Love (1998), and worked as a freelance teacher in France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Austria, and the Netherlands.[1] Overlie continued to perform in New York in an improvisation ensemble alongside Wendell Beavers and Paul Langland. They performed their work at Danspace, St. Mark's Church, New York Judson Church, Columbia University, Simone Forti Studio, Francis Alenikoff Studio, and Eden's Expressway among others from 1987 to 2001. Some of their works include: No Angels, No Apes (1993), Wallpaper (1999) and Rooms and Buildings (2001).[1] Overlie was awarded the 1999 Bessie Achievement Award, for her lifetime contribution to dance,[18] "For a pallet-and-knife architecture of the choreographic canvas, a Sustained Achievement in luminous formalism concerning the body's place in time and space, a stillness drawn by the eye around the moving form, as elegantly represented in Small Dance / Locations of Love".[19] 2000sIn January 1998, a national conference on the Viewpoints was held in New York, sponsored by New York University, Pace University and Stage Directors and Choreographer Foundation.[2] Overlie founded the Six Viewpoints Studio at Tisch School for the Arts in 2006 and continued teaching at The Experimental Theater Wing until 2015 when she retired and moved to Bozeman, Montana.[2] 2010sAfter twenty years of working on the manuscript for the Six Viewpoints, Overlie completed and self-published Standing in Space: Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice in 2016. She resided in Bozeman, Montana, taught workshops in America and Europe and was organizing an advanced Six Viewpoints School.[4] The Six ViewpointsIntroduction and overviewThe Six Viewpoints is a philosophical and practical approach to articulate a post-modern perspective on performance. The practice involves deconstructing the physical stage and physical performance into its six Materials of composition: Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement and Story. These six elements have existed historically within a rigid hierarchy which gives prevalence to story and emotion in theatre, and shape and movement in dance. The Six Viewpoints releases the Materials from this fixed construct into a fluid non-hierarchical environment for re-examination. The act of deconstructing performance into its six materials invites the performer, director, artist to engage with the individual materials "allowing these elements to take the lead in a creative dialogue".[20] For Overlie, this shift in attention re-defines art and the role of the artist from a "creator/originator" mindset to what she called the "observer/participant", which centers on "witnessing, and interacting, ... working under the supposition that structure could be discerned rather than imposed".[21] Overlie observed this redefinition of the artist's endeavor to correspond with the artistic shift from modernism to post-modernism.[22] The theory and practice of the Six Viewpoints are organized in two parts: The Materials and The Bridge. The Materials (SSTEMS)When working with the materials, the artist is instructed to turn off the impulse to control or own the material, and is challenged to work very specifically with each material as an independent entity. Overlie recommends the artist to gather as much "useless" data as they can and to take time to explore.[20]
The six materials of composition, referred to with the acronym SSTEMS, are:
The BridgeThe Bridge is a sequence of nine laboratories that function as philosophical and pedagogical frameworks in which to engage with the materials. The Bridge presents the origins of the Viewpoints' approach to art and introduces into practice the philosophical concepts that are used to disintegrate and then reintegrate performance.[25] The nine laboratories of The Bridge are:
As a practice at large, The Six Viewpoints "is dedicated to reading the stage as a force of Nature" [27] WorksChoreography
Collaboration / dance
Collaboration / theater
*These productions were awarded Obie Awards [5][1] Awards and honors
Publications
See also
References
Further readingReviews:
Historical moments/day in the life: External links
|
||||||||
