ABSTRACT
I have never trained deeply in Viewpoints, either as developed by Mary Overlie in postmodern dance or as adapted for ensemble theater by Anne Bogart and SITI Company. But when I was invited to write an essay in response to Overlie’s work, I found that I did have something to say. Overlie links her Viewpoints to postmodernism and all versions of the Viewpoints attempt to horizontalize the elements or techniques out of which performances are composed. Yet it has always seemed to me somewhat ironic that a project of horizontalization should take the form of a closed set of six (or perhaps nine) relatively stable elements. In this essay, I attempt to push the idea of viewpoints as far as it can go. First I offer an intentionally jarring combination of historically and culturally diverse “viewpoints”. Then I consider examples of three contemporary forms that incarnate the impulse to horizontalize: the lexicon, the index, and the catalog. 1
