The Viewpoints: A Revolutionary Approach to Actor Training
TableRead Takeaways!
The Viewpoints emerged from 1960s postmodern art movements that challenged traditional artistic forms and embraced spontaneity, abstraction, and collaboration.
Mary Overlie created the original Six Viewpoints — Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story — influenced by dance innovators like Yvonne Rainer and Meredith Monk.
Anne Bogart and Tina Landau expanded Overlie’s work into Nine Physical Viewpoints to better serve actors and theatre-makers: Spatial Relationship, Kinesthetic Response, Shape, Gesture, Repetition, Architecture, Tempo, Duration, and Topography.
They also introduced Vocal Viewpoints such as Pitch, Dynamic, Acceleration/Deceleration, Silence, and Timbre to develop a performer's vocal presence alongside physical awareness.
Viewpoints are not a rigid method or rehearsal tool but a vocabulary of movement and sound that supports ensemble work, play, and dynamic performance creation.
The technique encourages risk-taking and heightened awareness, helping actors let go of preconceptions and respond authentically to their environment and ensemble.
It emphasizes ensemble collaboration, allowing performers to co-create visceral and responsive theatre through shared physical and spatial awareness.
Viewpoints can generate spontaneous, unrepeatable theatrical moments that are deeply rooted in instinct, space, and timing rather than scripted cues or intellectual analysis.
It helps actors build physical listening and responsiveness, sharpening their instincts and improving their connection to the present moment on stage.
Viewpoints is best learned through experience, not just theory, with its transformative impact revealed in active exploration, ensemble training, and improvisational performance.
What are the Viewpoints? To put this method for actor training into context, I think Anne Bogart and Tina Landau put it best. The following is quoted from Bogart & Landau’s The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition:
“A seismic cultural shift occurred in America during the middle of the last century. It was a shift marked by such events as the protests against the Vietnam War, the marches for civil rights, and the birth of abstract expressionism, postmodernism and minimalism. During the 1960s, this cultural explosion and artistic revolution gained momentum in New York City, San Francisco, and other urban centers and then spread across the nation. The movement was political, aesthetic and personal, and it altered the way artists thought about their processes, their audiences and their role in the world. . . . These postmodern pioneers forged the territory upon which we now stand. They rejected the insistence by the modern dance world upon social messages and virtuosic technique, and replaced it with internal decisions, structures, rules or problems. What made the final dance was the context of the dance. Whatever movement occurred while working on these problems became the art. This philosophy lies at the heart of both Viewpoints and Composition.“
So out of this tradition of experimentation and questioning arose the Viewpoints. The Viewpoints themselves were originally conceived by choreographer Mary Overlie, who had been strongly influenced by the Judson Church Group (including such innovators in dance and music as Robert Dunn, David Gordon, Yvonne Rainier, Meredith Monk, and John Cage). Originally, Overlie had only created six viewpoints (Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story). But upon meeting Mary Overlie at New York University in 1979, Anne Bogart (and later Tina Landau) were inspired to expand these six Viewpoints dancers and choreographers into nine viewpoints for actors and theatre practitioners.
To again quote from Bogart and Landau’s book (because I think their phrasing is very important):
“It was instantly clear that Mary’s approach to generating movement for the stage was applicable to creating viscerally dynamic moments of theatre with actors and other collaborators.“
So Viewpoints have become an opportunity for discovering new moments in theatre. “Visceral” and “dynamic” are very important terms, because the Viewpoints are not meant to be a rehearsal technique or a performance method in themselves. They are spontaneous interactions between a group of actors that are useful for training our senses and sense of play as well as building an ensemble.
The Viewpoints adapted by Bogart and Landau are nine physical Viewpoints (Spatial Relationship, Kinesthetic Response, Shape, Gesture, Repetition, Architecture, Tempo, Duration, and Topography). There are also Vocal Viewpoints (Pitch, Dynamic, Acceleration/Deceleration, Silence, and Timbre).
Of course, all of these descriptions I am giving you are just words, and the Viewpoints are a method for actor training that is best experienced and not verbalized. Viewpoints, by their nature, are meant to encourage more risk-taking and bolder choices in acting that are not confined by any particular expectations or a strict process. Through the improvised exploration of Viewpoints, artistic discovery is possible on a personal and group level. You have to see it to believe it!
During the course of this blog, I will be explaining the Viewpoints in more detail to the best of my ability, as well as including frequent updates on what I am reading, experiencing in life and the theatre, and the project itself once the time grows closer. To find out more specifics about the actual Viewpoints Project, visit this page devoted to an explanation of the process.