Anne Bogart
Excerpts from an interview with internationally acclaimed, NYC-based theater director Anne Bogart. Anne is known primarily for her work as founder and artistic director of the SITI Company and for working to develop an actor training technique called The Viewpoints. Interview originally aired on WKCR 89.9 fm as part of Commons Radio 8.
Q: Can you describe the Viewpoints?
AB: The Viewpoints is a movement improvisation training that was developed by a woman named Mary Overlie who is a choreographer. And it came out of the Judson Church era which is this late sixties, early seventies New York scene where a lot of choreographers who were very young and unknown in those times (are very famous and older now – people like Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon, Twyla Tharp) many people got together and essentially reinvented dance. And Mary Overlie came into the late part of this movement and was very affected by their innovations and came up with a system she calls the Six Viewpoints. I met Mary in 1980… 1979 and worked with her – we co-directed a few things, and she showed me what she was up to and I was knocked out by it. And I have -– to her delight and consternation and horror – have taken her work and developed it in a direction which has delighted me and I not so sure it’s completely delighted her. And from the Six Viewpoints we do something called the Nine physical Viewpoints, which is basically a training for actors so that they can learn on a daily basis to create fiction using elements of time and space. So it’s essentially a training. It’s like a – for a dancer it’s like a ballet bar that they would do before they’d dance. So it’s a training that actors do.
Q: Ok. And how does it relate to Suzuki training?
AB: It doesn’t relate to Suzuki at all. Suzuki training was developed by a Japanese company called the SCOT Company, which stands for the Suzuki Company of Toga and the Director Tadashi Suzuki, or as t hey say in Japan, Suzuki Tadashi. Which is also a very different kind of training. In a way more demanding, more rigorous than the Viewpoints training, which teaches not only strength but inner flexibility based on external strength. Vocal work – strong vocal work. Focus. It’s a training. We do both trainings. Before any rehearsal or performance we’ll do forty minutes of both – the Suzuki training followed by the Viewpoints training. They’re actually not at all similar. But they do inform each other, you know? It’s like putting chemicals together. Something we didn’t set out saying, oh we are a company – we meaning the SITI Company – we didn’t start out saying we are a company that does Viewpoints and Suzuki, but … but we do. Because it’s effective.
Q: In your book A Director Prepares you describe the directing process as creating conditions within which actors can work. How do you create those conditions?
AB: You know, it’s very banal. It has to do with – believe it or not, having a clean space, where there’s not junk in it, but clean. Treating it well. Starting on time, ending on time. Listening. Ultimately creation is not making something happen, it’s actually listening to what’s already happening. Respect. Attention. And an agreement to disagree, if you understand what I mean. To me collaboration is not about agreeing. I think there’s a disease of agreement in this country. Whereas the notion of disagreeing is how creativity happens. But disagreement with respect and with listening. And those are the condition in which I think something can happen.
Q: What is the advantage to working with a company – with the same people?
AB: Well you don’t have to start over each time. I mean it’s painful because you know if I work with new group of actors and designers, they would really enjoy me. They’d like my jokes, they’d think it’s really refreshing how I’m working. With a company, they all know your jokes, you can’t tell the same jokes, and if I pull out an old trick they look at me and say, Anne, we’ve done this before. So it’s much more difficult to work with a company. But at the same time, you start with a history, and you don’t have to explain things, and it’s uh visceral understanding and we’ve learned how to work together. We’ve worked very hard at it. We’ve all earned the right to be in the room together.
Q: Within this highly collaborative structure, what is the role of the individual?
AB: Well, you know there’s a saying that a director, for example, needs – and it’s the same thing for an actor – it’s for everybody in a collaborative process – you need a huge ego and no ego simultaneously. And that’s the paradox in which you live. If you come in just to be a collaborator and don’t bring your taste and brain and impulses and intuition into the act because you think it’s your ego getting in the way you’re in trouble. But at the same time, if you come in and that’s the only thing in the room, is your ego, then you’re in trouble. So actually it’s a negotiation between what you’re … you know, I think of a human being as an antenna and you receive information. And then you translate it. So your job is to keep the plaque off the antenna. That’s what training is. So you need all the things that make you an individual, but then you need to give over to the process at the same time.
Q: A lot of your work seems to be about creating vocabularies. What is the relationship between the way a group of actors and a director speak to each other and the way they speak to an audience?
AB: I’m not sure about creating vocabularies. I mean I try to find words that will make the work go faster. Which is you know, the Viewpoints help because I can say, you know, your Spatial Relationship could be better, and they understand what that means, the actors will fix that problem. That doesn’t have anything to do with what goes towards the audience. The audience isn’t thinking about Spatial Relationships, so I’m not sure … maybe you could re-phrase the question.
Q: Do you think that there’s something that an audience sees when watching a group of people who have learned to talk to each other?
AB: Oh yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And feels, too. I think an audience feels the relationships that are onstage. Recently the Theatre du Soleil, from Paris – not to be confused with Cirque du Soleil – with a director named Ariane Mnouskine, who’s someone I admire very much, came to New York, to Lincoln Center. And anyone who was there in that audience this summer – you feel those relationships. You feel the years of dedication. Of respect. It’s not something you could say, oh I see it because … it’s not something that is literal. But it’s something that is so present, you know. But theater is presence. And presence is something that is very difficult to describe. But the way they are awake together can only come through shared experiences.
Q; How do you feel about the American theater right now?
AB: I think it has weak knees. You know something that Tadashi Suzuki once said – most of the plays that he sees [in the US] he feels he could just blow and they’d fall over. That they’re weak. And he went on to say, a bit arrogantly perhaps: I don’t really care what you think about my work. I just don’t want you to be able to dismiss. And ultimately I think he’s right. [The weakness] is due to the confusion that exists about the difference between television and film and theater and the disenfranchisement on the stage of the actor, based on editing. In other words, once editing came into being in film and television, the power of the actor’s responsibility for the whole experience of the audience was taken away from them. And unfortunately, now actors think they’re being edited by directors, so they don’t take responsibility for the whole experience of the play. So consequently, it behooves us as theater people to question our assumptions about what acting is, what an audience is, what a play is. And I think that kind of interaction will help a great deal.
Q: The SITI Company seems to be studying American theatrical forms. What’s the value in looking back?
AB: We have one of the richest cultural heritages. Richer than we imagine. And we pretend like we don’t have one. We pretend we’re all new. As Gore Vidal called us, the United States of Amnesia. But we invented jazz, this melting pot that never melted. We invented cartoons. We invented the detective novel. And mostly, for me, the most exciting part of the performance heritage is vaudeville, which bled into television. You can see it in the early I Love Lucy episodes or the Jackie Gleason show. You see that direct transposition of vaudeville. Which for some reason we ignore because we try to pretend that we’re European. But we’re not. And we have an aural culture rather than a literary culture, and we pretend that’s not true. But if we could reconnect with our heritage I think we’d find a lot more tools to use in the rehearsal room.