Viewpoints

Quick Sketch

Use Viewpoints to analyze, restructure, and re-envision your play.

When to Use

At any point in the process.

Viewpoints

Director Anne Bogart took the idea of Viewpoints from choreographer Mary Overlie and modified them into an acting and directing vocabulary for dealing with the issues of time and space. The represent a clear way of talking about and analyzing different parts of every moment of theatre in relation to the physical body on stage. The Viewpoints book is an excellent place to learn about the specifics of the method. Below I've reiterated the ways these ideas are used in Viewpoints.

VIEWPOINTS of TIME

• Tempo -- Do they move, think, act (etc.) quickly or slowly?
• Duration -- Do they do things (pace, rock, sit, think, speak, etc.) for a long or short period of time before moving on to something else?
• Kinesthetic Response -- How do they spontaneously react to people and events outside of themselves?

  e.g. Stand when a woman enters a room, duck when they hear gunfire, vomit when they smell a rose.

• Repetition -- Do they repeat anything?
  • Internal (movement within their own body)?
  • External (repeat the shape, tempo, gesture, etc. of something outside their own body)?

VIEWPOINTS of SPACE

Shape

• Is their body primarily straight or curved (or a combination)?
• Is their body stationary or moving through space?
• How is their body spatially related to:
  
  • Itself?
  • The setting?
  • The other characters?
  • The objects (props)?

Gesture

• Do they Gesture?
• What do they do?
• Is it public or private?
• Does it express the normal world (a handshake) or some inner state or emotion?

Architecture

• What is the environment of the play?
• Solid Mass (walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, windows, doors, etc.).
• Texture (wood or metal or fabric).
• Light (the sources of light and placement shadow).
• Color (e.g. how one red chair among many black ones would affect our choreography in relation to that chair)

Spatial Relationship

• How far or close do they choose to be in relation to:
• Other Characters?
• Other Groups of Characters?
• Areas of the setting (corners, chairs, objects, etc.)?

Topography (the landscape, the floor pattern, or the design created through movement in the space.)

• Do they move differently in different parts of the setting?
• Do they only turn in one direction?
• Do they avoid any parts of the setting?
• Do they remain only in one part of the setting?
• Other observations about how they move in relation to the setting?

Exercise

1. Re-read your entire play.
2. Write each of your characters' names on their own note card.
3. Spend 5 minutes, minimum, in the body of at least two or your characters (move around in the room, in the context of the world and situations you've created in your play, as if you were them).
4. At the end of each 5 minute session return to their note card and answer the following questions from that character's perspective:

5. Quickly (and with little thought) write down five of each of the following:

   Objects (e.g. Vase, Tree, Necklace, Letter, etc.)

   Sounds (e.g. Birds, Shotgun, Water, Echo, etc.)

   Actions (e.g. Slap, Spit, Cry, Shatter, etc.)

6. Instead of trying to rewrite your play, you are going to use all of the above information to "perform" a written Composition (write something different, in a play format, using info collected previously and some random items) as follows:

7. Write a 3-part piece. Each part must be no less than 2 pages in length. Each part must be separated by a brief monologue given by a different character (of no more than 30 seconds in length). Each part is titled as follows:

   Part 1: The way things look in this world

   Monologue #1

   Part 2: The way things sound in this world

   Monologue #2

   Part 3: The way people are in this world

8. You must also (try to) include all of the following:

   A great deal of the character info observed from the answers in #4.

   All of the Objects, Sounds, and Actions written down in #5.

   A clear audience (are they observers? A jury? A rioting crowd? etc.)

   A Revelation of Space (the environment must, at some point, open/expand/collapse to reveal something).

   A Revelation of Object (open a box to reveal a gun, move a sofa and reveal a dead body, etc.)

   A Surprise Entrance

   A Broken Expectation

   Two Uses of Extreme Contrast (light/dark, loud/silent, etc.)

Reflect

This exercise forces you to self-analyze your work and then completely re-envision it (often by abandoning things you thought were important). While the final product may (or may not) be what you initially set out to write, the hope with this exercise is that you:

1. Discovered something new to add into your play.
2. Analyzed your play to identify faults.
3. Imagined your play and found something valuable in the seemingly chaotic process.

References

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewpoints
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bogart
• The book -- Anne Bogart: Viewpoints
• http://tedb.byu.edu/lesson/show?id=470