Mary Overlie interviewed by Nicolas Noreña
Hello everyone, welcome to our monthly interviews on morningtomorning.org. For this month I had the pleasure of interviewing Mary Overlie. Mary is a dancer, choreographer, theorist, philosopher, teacher, and an innovator in each of these fields. She is originally from Montana where she started her training as a dancer. She later moved to San Francisco where she studied modern dance and met Yvonne Rainer who brought her to New York. In New York, Mary was part of The Natural History of the American Dancer, studied Floor Barre from Jean Hamilton, formed her own company with Wendell Beavers, Paul Langland and Nina Martin, and performed her pieces such as Adam, Small Dance and The Muses among many others.
She is one of the founders of several institutions such as Movement Research, Danspace in St. Mark's Church, The Pro Series in Vienna and the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU'S Tisch School of the Arts. As I mentioned before, Mary is an innate innovator and a very careful thinker, her contribution to performance is usually understated and I want to publicly thank her for generating the language and the philosophical body of the viewpoints. Mary currently teaches Floor Barre and Viewpoints at the Experimental Theatre Wing. She resides in Brooklyn with her poodle, Dallas, and is working on her book.
How does being a dancer affect the way you perceive, think and interact with the world?
Being a dancer affects me in many ways. I think perhaps the most significant are: it
makes me understand how integral the organic functions of the body are to the way we are
able to think and feel. Fluidity of motion equates with fluidity and effectiveness of
our mental process. In my world, to train the body is to train the mind. I therefore dislike
over-regimental, over-repetitive, timed group physical training. To me, it is not physical training
that can result in making a dancer. It is simply a training to control rather than to articulate.
Being a dancer also puts me in contact with an exquisite love of the body, my body and the
non-verbal world in which I perceive body language as actually more direct than any
word that is spoken.
What makes movement dance?
Intention. There is the physical intention to work and there is the physical intention to
play sports or have fun. There is the physical intention to express something-
that intention is what causes some movement to be called the art of dance.
How did you experience dance before having an articulate language to talk about it?
I ran around the hills naked at night, played in creeks, built homes out of bushes, ran
down hills, hid on moss banks near creeks.
Can you recall when you started to question technical training/the dance world?
I never did. I never had a need to "make a break" from technical dance training.
It was all technical to me, crawling is a very technical thing to do and perform.
Technical training, however, has always caused me to question myself, my body, structure.
What does improvisation offer to choreography? What does choreography offer to improvisation?
I do not see any real separation between improvisation and choreography. I truly think
that if a dancer is not able to improvise well they have not fulfilled a true contact with the
art form. Improvisation is the petri dish of movement.
How does an idea for a dance originate in you?
In different ways, the particular topic of a choreography, that is. But, extending over all dances I make, there is
the major project; I never make a work unless I think that it is needed by the
world, a country, the people, a city, a time, an era. That the dance will have something to offer
to a perceived question or transition or dilemma. So there is always this question at
the beginning of a new work-What Is It This Time?
I once created a solo from a technical question. What would a dance look like if it had no
space? If the material of Space was removed from the palette? So I started with a Six Viewpoints Theory manipulation; in order to remove Space I made a normal dance of pure schlock
movement (in order to test this idea out the quality of choreography did not matter). Then I removed the
space, which left just the placement of the weight, the turning of the bones, the focus of
the eyes and the tension and relaxation of the muscles. As I worked on it I got more and
more absorbed. Then I realized that this solo work, based on a theoretical question, was falling in line with one of my most powerful drives as an artist in my big picture.
What was that?
I had discovered that I believed in making movement/choreography/dance that was so delicate, small, and subtle that it was able to address or speak to the function of the audience's high consciousness. I was hooked. I ended up working on this dance over ten years and performing it for another ten.
Do you believe it was necessary for you to understand your process in order to be able to perceive this clarity of your vision?
I think that process and vision are developed alongside each other. You can't understand what you are doing, at first, until you do it. Later, a great deal of thinking and self critique is needed to clarify what your work is and what it is saying...
Is there a time when you have tried to choreograph something other than the human body?
Yes, I choreographed cars for Lee Bruer in a piece called The Saint and the Football
Player. I collaborated on that work with someone from his technical staff. I am sorry
that I can’t remember his name.
What is your relationship to order and chaos?
I love and trust in chaos. Order is essential to life. It is life. Chaos, as in Chaos
Theory, is a word we have been able to give to a higher order that we had actually been
able to perceive before. Each time we expand our understanding of the order of life, the
better off will we be because we will, each time, take a step towards being near to the real
way things function. I only wish that we could let go more, let go of the old formulas of
order, and study the phenomenon of what really happens without manipulation.
We have been terrified into thinking that we have to control things, be the sole author of
change, to make things go in our direction rather than integrate with how things go. In
fact I think that any progress that we have made is from accidents of the real functioning
of life slipping through and someone articulating them in such a powerful way that some
space for change, a new order, innovation, can actually do some good to make things
better. I’m in the Richard Foreman camp on that. "The Eighteenth Century weights on us
like lead” A lyric from one of his operas.
What are the pros and cons of reification? How are labels helpful? How are they dangerous?
The pros and cons of labeling. Pro – we must label our experiences, paint them,
dance them, act them, make music from them, and make
up new languages and concepts because Reification is the act of ordering.
It is so necessary to life that there is actually no way to stop it from happening.
Con – When people do not realize that labels must
change in order for them not to turn into prisons for us to sit in, unchanged, in fact sliding
backwards, for if things do not change, they die or become deadly.
Reifying or Re-reifying is very difficult work. You can’t get there, ultimately, by
copying. You have to put the time in, you have to be willing to struggle, you have to be
willing to fail, be booed and make bad choices. I wish reifying would be taught in schools
because then we could stop producing sheep that only know how to follow. Our society
is supposed to be about the act of reification, that is a democracy, but no one has the time
to struggle with it. The concept of taking care of people is very weak in this country, and
getting weaker by the minute all over the world. I think in the Quakers, the custom of just
sitting together in silence might have some merit. Or perhaps everyone should drive
across the country every year.
For more information about Mary and the viewpoints visit her website: www.sixviewpoints.com