ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the processes of affective attunement in The Viewpoints, Mary Overlie’s theoretical and practical structure for actor training and artistic practice. Developed by Overlie in the interdisciplinary arts scene of New York City’s SoHo district in the 1970s, The Viewpoints operates as an approach to performance, rather than a method, attuning the performer to six key ‘materials’ present in any performance ecology—Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, Story. The Viewpoints approach addresses these materials not as objects for the performer to control, but rather as a practice attune to them as languages being ‘spoken’ by those materials. Through the consideration of simple physical gesture used by Overlie in her teaching, I describe how The Viewpoints pedagogy and practice operates in the minor key—a ‘minor gesture’ for the production of minor gestures that is enabled by the actor as what Overlie calls, ‘The Original Anarchist’.
