A zine series about Viewpoints by someone who has never studied The Six Viewpoints.

In the ‘70’s renowned teacher and theater artists Mary Overlie conceived of a different way of looking at performance, and this came to be known as The Six Viewpoints. Concepts from this system, or manner, of being in dialogue with your work as a maker of performance spread widely - if you’ve studied dance or theater in the past 30 years its likely that you’ve heard of, encountered, or learned ideas related to this work.

In 2020, locked down in northern Georgia and casting about for something “useful” I could be doing, I briefly thought about studying The Six Viewpoints in a formal way. I’d buy Standing in Space and I’d look for workshops or classes online…but then after the most cursory look through her website a different thought occurred to me. I thought it would be an interesting pedagogical experiment to draw up and write out everything I already assumed I knew about The Six Viewpoints - as in - what’s everything I assume I know about time? space? emotion? It seemed like exactly the kind of absurdly large question to ask during a global pandemic. And a zine seemed like the perfect format to cover these too big topics or areas, something so insignificant, just paper and a copy machine, I could do it all at home and wouldn’t need other people in a space like when I make a dance.

Issues with printing and formatting stymied this project for a long time, but in a way I’m glad it got delayed. It gave me a chance to meet Nicolás Noreña, a brilliant theater maker, performer and member of the Mary Overlie Legacy Project Team, to share the zines with him and quiet some concerns I’d had about releasing them after Mary’s passing (artistic lineage is real in the dance world and the idea that I’d be perceived as claiming it falsely felt…gross). It also gave me a chance to get feedback from Jessie Young, Whitney Brown, and some remarkably simple yet effective drafting advice from Joshua Meyer when I realized I had to completely reformat all of the original documents and texts. Huge thank you to everyone named above.

There’s six zines total, each of them are twelve pages and cover one of each of the six viewpoints - Story, Space, Time, Emotion, Movement, Shape. $15 each + shipping (unless you pick up)