Viewpoints for Actors: A Practical Introduction

The director says the first week of rehearsal will start with Viewpoints. Everyone else in the room seems to know what that means. You nod, and then spend twenty minutes walking in straight lines, turning at right angles, and trying to notice everyone in the room without looking straight at anyone.

It can feel strange the first time. But the point is practical: Backstage’s guide describes the training as helping performers listen and respond to each other, so you react to the room instead of waiting for your cue.

The short version: Viewpoints is a vocabulary for the raw materials of performance, time and space, plus a set of exercises for training your attention to them. It began in postmodern dance with choreographer Mary Overlie, was adapted for actors by directors Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, and is now used in drama schools and rehearsal rooms. You can start learning it with a few simple exercises, some of which work alone.

Where Viewpoints comes from

Most guides start with a list of nine words. The history explains why the list looks the way it does.

Viewpoints started with Mary Overlie, a choreographer and dancer. Her legacy site describes how she set out to answer a basic question: what are dance and theater made of? Her answer was six materials: space, shape, time, emotion, movement, and story. She developed the Six Viewpoints in the 1970s at NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing, where they became part of the core curriculum, and she taught there until 2015.

Director Anne Bogart met Overlie at NYU in 1979. According to the publisher’s history of the method, Bogart later met director and playwright Tina Landau in 1987, and the two developed Overlie’s ideas into the nine-Viewpoint version taught in many training programs. Their The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition was first published by Theatre Communications Group in 2005.

Bogart went on to found SITI Company with director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. SITI’s training page credits Overlie with first setting out Viewpoints and describes teaching it alongside the Suzuki Method, a separate physical training.

One more piece of history worth knowing: Overlie’s own book, Standing in Space, came out in 2016, eleven years after Bogart and Landau’s. A 2024 article in Theatre Survey, “The Constructive Deconstruction of Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints”, notes that Bogart and Landau’s book has become the accepted account of where Viewpoints came from. It also describes critics asking why the nine leave out some of Overlie’s original six. Two of them, emotion and story, aren’t among the nine. If your teacher trained with Overlie’s students, you may meet the six; many classes teach Bogart and Landau’s nine.

The nine Viewpoints, in plain words

Bogart and Landau’s nine physical Viewpoints fall into two groups, time and space. Backstage’s guide to Viewpoints walks through them. Here they are in plain words.

Viewpoints of time

• Tempo: how fast a movement happens.
• Duration: how long a movement or a stillness lasts before it changes.
• Kinesthetic response: your spontaneous reaction to movement outside you, such as someone else’s sudden turn or a door closing.
• Repetition: repeating something, whether your own earlier movement or someone else’s.

Viewpoints of space

• Shape: the outline your body makes, alone or with other bodies.
• Gesture: a movement with a beginning, middle, and end, either everyday or expressive.
• Architecture: the room itself, its walls, floor, doors, furniture, and light, and how you use it.
• Spatial relationship: the distance between you and other bodies or objects.
• Topography: the path you trace across the floor. Some older writing calls it floor pattern.

There’s a vocal side too. Backstage lists vocal Viewpoints including pitch, dynamic (loudness), acceleration and deceleration, silence, and timbre. Sources and teachers differ on the exact list, so don’t worry if your class names a slightly different set.

Start with soft focus

Viewpoints training often starts with how you look. BYU’s Theatre Education Database, in its introductory Viewpoints unit, describes soft focus as letting your eyes relax so they take in the whole room at once, rather than fixing on one or two things. The opposite, hard focus, is intense attention on a single thing.

Soft focus is what makes the rest possible. You can’t respond to a movement across the room if you never saw it. Try this now, wherever you are:

• Let your gaze settle on nothing in particular, straight ahead.
• Without moving your eyes, notice what’s at the edges: the left wall, the floor, a lamp on your right.
• If anyone else is in the room, keep them in view at the edge of your vision without looking at them.
• Walk slowly and keep that wide view as you move.

You’ll probably feel the pull to snap back into hard focus on the nearest object. That pull is what the training works on.

Exercises to try in a rehearsal room

These come from published lesson plans and workshop handouts. They need an open floor and, for most of them, a group.

• Walking the grid. BYU’s unit describes the floor as imaginary graph paper. Walk only along the lines and turn only at right angles. Once that’s easy, change your tempo while keeping soft focus.
• The 1-10 walk. In BYU’s tempo lesson, someone calls a number from 1 (slowest) to 10 (fastest) and everyone shifts to that speed while using the whole room. It shows quickly how tempo changes the way a movement feels.
• Circle, clump, line. In BYU’s time lesson, the group, in soft focus and without a leader or any talking, forms a circle, a clump, or a line. Nobody says when. That’s kinesthetic response at group scale.
• Flow. A workshop handout by Richard Hess for the Educational Theatre Association describes the group moving through the spaces between people, following one another, and changing tempo together.

One sign it’s working: the room starts moving in ways nobody planned, and nobody can tell you who started it.

Exercises you can do alone

Viewpoints is an ensemble training, but you can build the basic skills on your own in any room with a little floor space.

• Soft-focus walks. Do the exercise above on a walk outside or around your home, noticing what’s at the edges of your vision.
• A tempo ladder. Set a timer for every 30 seconds and change your walking tempo each time it goes off, from 1 up to 10 and back down. Notice which tempos feel like a character.
• Architecture study. Spend five minutes moving only in relation to the room: lean on a wall, trace a doorframe, sit on the floor under a window. Change one thing at a time.
• Topography on paper. Draw the path you’d take across your set in a scene you’re working on. Then walk it, and try a different path with the same start and end.

None of this replaces a group, where kinesthetic response does much of the work. But it trains your eyes and gives you the vocabulary before you’re in the room.

Taking Viewpoints into a scene

Viewpoints isn’t just a warm-up. Joan Herrington’s article “Directing with the Viewpoints” in Theatre Topics describes directors setting a scene physically before the dialogue comes in. BYU’s unit on Viewpoints scene work follows the same order: build the scene in movement first, then add the words.

Try it with this exchange from Act 3, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The four young lovers have been fighting in the forest, and Hermia turns on Helena. From the Standard Ebooks text:

HERMIA: You, mistress, all this coil is ’long of you:
Nay, go not back.

HELENA: I will not trust you, I,
Nor longer stay in your curst company.
Your hands than mine are quicker for a fray,
My legs are longer though, to run away.

HERMIA: I am amazed, and know not what to say.

The text is full of time and space. “Nay, go not back” tells you Helena is backing away: a spatial relationship changing. “Quicker for a fray” and “run away” are about tempo. Helena’s line about running away implies an exit, which is a piece of topography. And Hermia’s last line, once Helena has gone, invites a long stillness before she speaks.

Work it in three passes with a partner:

• First, play the scene without words. Only the distance between you, the tempo of your moves, and the path Helena takes to the exit.
• Next, add the lines, keeping the physical score you found.
• Last, change one Viewpoint on purpose, such as having Helena back away at a slow tempo while she says “My legs are longer though, to run away.”

You can play with the vocal side too. Try “I am amazed, and know not what to say” after a long silence, then with no pause at all, and hear how differently it lands. If you’re working alone, Offbook reads the other characters and waits for your line, and you can change how fast they speak or add custom pauses to try the scene at a different tempo.

You can find more scenes to work on in our library of public-domain plays, and rehearse classic scenes out loud with our free run lines online tool.

How Viewpoints fits with other techniques

One way to think of Viewpoints is as outside-in work: you start with time and space and let feeling come from what happens. That makes it a useful partner to inside-out work. You might find your objective with Stanislavski’s tools, then use Viewpoints to discover how that want moves through the room. Our guides to the magic if and Laban efforts cover two other techniques that pair well with it.

The trap is treating it as abstract movement that stops when the text starts. The point is to keep the same listening once you’re speaking: noticing your partner’s tempo, the distance between you, and the room, and letting them change you.

Questions actors ask

Is topography the same as floor pattern?

Yes. Topography is the path you trace across the floor, and some older writing on Viewpoints calls it floor pattern.

Who created Viewpoints?

Mary Overlie, with her Six Viewpoints. Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s nine grew out of her work.

Is Viewpoints the same as the Suzuki Method?

No. SITI Company teaches them as two separate methods, side by side.

Do I need a class to learn Viewpoints?

A class is the best way, because so much of it depends on reacting to other people. But you can learn the vocabulary from The Viewpoints Book and practice soft focus, tempo, and architecture on your own before you join one.