Mary Overlie
Performer, choreographer, and the leading theoretician/originator of the internationally practiced Viewpoints technique, a theoretical deconstruction and reconstruction for post-modern theatre. She has had a long career as a performer, choreographer, teacher and theater collaborator, working extensively in both the United States and Europe. She has worked with Paul Langland, Nina Martin and Wendell Beavers. Ms. Overlie and Beavers formed a company from 1976 to 1980. She has collaborated with theatre directors including Lawrence Sacharow, Lee Breuer, JoAnne Akailitis, Brian Jucha and Anne Bogart. Some of these collaborations have won Obies, including “Dead End Kids.” Ms. Overlie is a founder of Danspace at St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery; Movement Research, a dance co-operative now in its twenty fifth year of operation; The Experimental Theatre Wing, a studio in Tisch School of the Arts undergraduate drama department; The Pro Series, experimental dance workshops designed for the Tanz Wochen, the summer dance festival of Vienna. She is currently teaching at the Experimental Theatre Wing, working on a book for The Six Viewpoints, designing a certificate program for The Six Viewpoints, and performing occasionally. She was the founding teacher of ETW and directed the Studio from 1989 to 1991. She was awarded the Bessie.
When would you say movement first entered your vision?
I was thinking about that on my way to see you; I always like to be prepared. It’s a precious thing I think about. My first memories… I knew this person…my father…he was a man with a message. And he would leave us on the farm… my younger brother, two, and me. He was sure I’d be fine. Nothing ever seemed to bother me as long as I had a project. The only thing I didn’t seem to learn how to do was walk because I danced everywhere. Before I knew there was something called dance.
I began physical training. I discovered a raft. I couldn’t bounce on it; it always seemed to have the upper hand. I dragged a bicycle out of the trash. I rode the bike, growing up in Montana everywhere. It was a land of physicality. I remember doing a lot of sliding. I’d find an open cardboard box, and on the dry grass, it was very slippery, and we'd go really fast, careening down the hill. I thought there was an alligator hidden somewhere at the bottom. My brother and I would learn about our space this way. But we couldn’t ever find that alligator. One time, I felt a gash on my leg from it. I went searching for it, as an adult later…it was a railroad spike, like an alligator. But we could never find it every time we went down always crashing into it.
Were you drawn to certain types of expression in school?
I went to a very good school; they had an excellent school system. I had tremendous concentration and endurance as a child but I was severely dyslexic. I couldn’t recognize one moment to the next; they didn’t know what it was. There was an art exhibit around Thanksgiving so I decided to draw an ear of corn, kernel by kernel. It took me weeks. Here I was, in the first grade, they must have thought: “What is this kid doing?” I could not be pulled away. My teacher left me the whole semester to draw. I remember it vividly
I sometimes paint if I need to lose who I am. And then I remember who I am.
Did you continue painting?
Well, we left the farm and moved across the street, near the painters. And the woman there, became my art mother. I adopted her, much to others dismay. And you could say, that’s when Viewpoints started too, in her household, because Montana is so vast. Friends were scattered 300 miles apart so a casual visit was not possible. Everyone would congregate at her house and party for weeks, and then spend another week. They would always come in the summer and the adults would make funny, deep, silly art things and talk about painting. I was about nine, a very interesting age.
I had no idea what I’d be. Something about that age made me hungry. And then this man came to town. He was ballet dancer, and he had grown up in Montana. He had started very young as a dancer. I don’t know who trained him; he tried to dance in New York City, but he couldn’t perform – so what do you do when you want to perform and can’t. Well, he freaked out, drove through Central Park until his money was gone, and came back to Montana. Well, here he was. So he carefully built a dance studio; he was very obsessive to details. He gravitated to my “art parents.” He started giving classes in his studio, it became a ballet studio. Of course, I had to attend.
He didn’t know to teach anything other than ballet. He was aware that ballet had damaged him, but it became his own form, and he made it up as we went along. He took me up to Calgary to see the Royal Canadian Ballet. I was fourteen; a “virgin dancer,” I had never seen dance like this. I had never seen a movie.
Well, the dancers came on stage and they all seemed to be the same. They’d lift their arms, and I recognized the movement. I was like the steps I had been doing in class but I had never learned what a forte was. There was not hope for me to go to college.. And here it was being done, and I was confused. How did they get all those people to do the same thing? How did that happen? I couldn’t relate to it.
So dancing became your life at that point?
I just sort of jumped into it, deeply, incomprehensibly. I became so serious. By the time I was 17, I had been studying for three years and the summer had come and now it was over. (I had worked all summer). And now what was I going to do? My mother thought I should become a sign painter; there was no hope for me to go college
Well, the son of the woman who was a very wealthy Wyoming rancher had heard they had opened a theatre in California. To get there we would have to hop a freight train to California. He asked me: Do you want to come with me?”
I knew where I was headed – I was going to study at Anna Halprin’s school. I had about 50 dollars, and the day I was packing my suitcase, my mother surprised me. She asked me: “What are you doing?” “I’m going away.” “Oh.” That’s all she said. She didn’t say another word. I rose and left.
Well, we almost froze to death going over the Donner Pass. We were in the part of the flatbed car when they go down in the middle; we went down that far to hide. We were going so fast, and it was way below zero. If it had gone for another two hours, we wouldn’t have made it. Finally the train came down into the San Fernando Valley. It was 1964, and I had no idea what was going on. I was this person who had only been out of Montana once, to Minneapolis and I felt very lost, quite miserable. I had no idea how to get on a bus, it scared me. I had never eaten out in a restaurant. Even the food was strange.
What happened?
I was seventeen, and it became a total immersion. There were classes with Anna who saw me as very listless. When she saw I was running out of money, she suggested I teach in Berkeley. I also started taking a ballet class; I was shocked. I did the barre okay, and when the pianist started playing and they started dancing, I was terrified; I ran out of the room.
It took a little bit but I walked back in there; I was overwhelmed. I learned the terminology although I didn’t like it; I thought it was dangerous. I just felt: too many dancing bears. It took me a lot of courage after recuperating from the shock.
I thought I had been doing ballet from my years in Montana, and I was used to improvising. I began to use my body for immense plies; it was my way to paint, and I never had been a person expressing art or dance. I didn’t know what it was, but I loved being in Berkeley. I started taking modern dance classes, especially Limon. I tried to do Graham. My body didn’t like it. I studied all the techniques; I needed to learn.
I started teaching when I was twenty when I moved to San Francisco. I thought I could teach modern dance class. In 1970 when I left, I had been there six years – it felt like an immense lifetime.
In ‘69 I saw Grand Union perform, Merce Cunningham, and Martha Jenkins opened the Cunningham studio, it was something I had been waiting for all my life. It was an amazing thing. I had been suffering in the modern dance classes, waiting for Merce to come along, and I said: “Hi, Dad.”
All his choreography was the first constructed in my head between nine and eleven years of age. I had to find a way to speak about dance; it was too technical. I couldn’t find anything that matched dancing. They had discovered a technique of perspective, where you put your light, where the center of the focus is.
Was teaching something you knew you would continue doing?
I was sure it was out there; that I was going to do this for the art form.
A few years ago, I was the Head of the Experimental Wing at New York University, and one of my duties my first year was to meet the parents of the students who just got accepted into the undergraduate Drama Department. We met them at a breakfast and all the teachers had been assigned to a table. I had twelve parents and the women looked especially uncomfortable, and the men were really miserable. I thought: They’re upset, they’re worried; this is not what they had in mind. Obviously, the wives were worried, nervous, more relaxed with the choice of their child than perhaps their husbands. So I decided to help the kids and the parents. I asked: “Does anyone here know why their kid wanted to act? Did you see it early on?” Every man shook their heads, but the women were searching through their family lineage. One woman said: My mother and my great aunt played the piano.” They were really searching. I told them how I came to it. “You know they were born with this, and you should be very happy,” I told them, "When the students joined their families, the parents looked at me, and said: You have an amazing family. A family that cares for its members on every level.
You’ve also been working on your own book for a while.
For 27 years – I finished it 5 times. I’m almost there, I do think it’s almost there. I went through part of those first five years leaning how to write. How do you sit in a chair and write when the hubris is killing you? No one knows where you’ve been. To live in a world and then the exhaustion, reading what you’ve done and to realize the tragic truth.
I wrote eight hours a day; I’d get lost. I got tired in those years. I generated what I called “the swamp;” I tried editing it myself. I was told I was writing in two or three different personalities. An editor helped me find a writing style. I formulated a new language; it took me a long time. I had the tendency to circle things unrelated to each other. Finally, I got it laid out in a linear progression.
Now a new book is rising out of its ashes after all these years; I’m exhausted. My life became teaching and writing, teaching and writing. I’m still teaching, but I made huge headway with the book. When I went to teach a workshop in San Francisco, in the course of teaching, I had a breakthrough. I could write a chapter in a totally different style somehow, I still don’t understand it, but in my Buddhist minimalist manner, suddenly it became clear. I’m still not that comfortable with this style, but this re-writing has changed my perspective to Viewpoints.
We work so much for results because we obviously believe we have to end up with something – is that the opposite than the process?
It’s a matter how you go about attaining the result. It’s a matter of dealing with expectations. The only way I deal with them is to subvert them. By managing immediately to give a real experience and those observing will be like, “Oh my God, I can see how it can become art!”
If I reach out of my hip sockets, I can become a panther. Expectations create a certain mood, like a judgmental place. So much of it begins as children when we have expectations. We know something will happen. But what can happen when we have a real experience – change happens – the joy just flows out and you stop worrying. You can handle any kind of setback.
What gives you the greatest joy?
Driving my car around New York. I can get in a car and just drive in all the traffic, like in a herd, a herd of traffic.
I play with time all the time, stepping out of normal time; it’s much easier to live there. I’m just slightly slower than other drivers are. In the gap, in the gracious gap, there is a space between them and myself. I’m moving them slowly. We’re playing with time and space, and presence.
Being in front of others on stage is not natural. You have to be able to have yourself onstage, eyelashes batting, scared on the surface, watching the audience watch you. In order to do that, you have to put it out there, in absolutely infinity. In order to open up the audience, you have to be lovable. It makes such a beautiful basis so your character is not hiding behind anything. To come onstage as another part of the conversion.
When Viewpoints first began, they didn’t want it. They said: “She’s a dancer.” So I showed I was just adding on. Now look what’s happened – all across America and many other places teach Viewpoints. I believe it adds something. I would like to see the evolution continue. I had studied a little Stanislavsky. I realized sense memory was like having one of the most beautiful instruments at your beck and call.
Viewpoints are really about the development of awareness, a meditative, interactive process, so, in the development of awareness, one is drawn into dialogue and dialogue becomes action.
My other big joy I’m working with is presence. I just became a mini-master with my work. With my students I’m exploring presence. I feel I’m in better command of my work now. I can just play with structure. Finding out what I can do every day.
