Anne Bogart: Viewpoints is an extremely informative and evocative collection of essays about the contemporary theatre director Anne Bogart, her methodologies, and practices. This book is useful for someone trying to understand the medium of contemporary, or post-modern theater. The book explains and describes Bogart's innovative performance methods known as “Viewpoints.” Viewpoints are a philosophy of movement translated into a technique for training performers and creating movement on stage. The development of Viewpoints has literally caused a major change in the teaching of theater in the past decade. Opposed to classic “Method” based teachings, which are based in psychology and the text, training in “Viewpoints” is more concerned with the actor's body and the movement on stage first, so that when a company approaches a text they share a common vocabulary for movement. The reason this is important to understand is because it is through this “new” approach that Anne Bogart has truly opened up the and broken down the medium of theater.
In the book we come to understand what is essential to the medium of theater. Because so many other mediums are nested in the medium of theater, Anne Bogart, in her work and training, constantly asks the questions, why do we need theater? What is the medium of theater? Her techniques for answering these questions focus on the live performer, the actor, and the process of collectively, publicly watching a live performance.
Anne Bogart: Viewpoints is comprised of various essays and some are, of course, more insightful than others. Particularly useful for theater and media studies, I suggest reading the chapters “Anne Bogart and the New Play” by Paula Vogel, “The Meat of the Medium: Anne Bogart and the American Avant-Garde” by Porter Anderson, “Worlds of Bogart” by Mel Gussow,” and “The Paradox of the Circle” by Eelka Lampe. Bogart believes that “Western theatre, or more precisely, the American branch of Western theatre, which perpetuates psychological realism and therefore a status quo in the power fabrics of social relationships, is in a state of crisis.” According to her, “the dominant acting style based on Strasberg's Method is hopelessly outdated…it still works for TV and film but not anymore for theatre, if theatre wants to be taken seriously as an art form.” Although the essays don't directly address questions of theater and media, they do help the reader understand and question the medium.
The book has numerous examples of theatrical pieces written and created by Bogart and her theater company, SITI. Particularly interesting, and central to the book, is a piece entitled The Medium , which is based on the life and writings of Marshall McLuhan. Discussion of the piece helps the reader understand what Bogart is attempting to do in the contemporary medium of theater. The play addresses the concern of what will happen to theater in the wake of technological advances, and the explosion of new media forms. Theater, for Bogart, is about communication. Theater is a medium for communicating ideas and stories to an audience and with collaborators. This principle is central, and is looked at carefully in sections of the book that are written by her collaborators. Anne Bogart: Viewpoints is not a book of performance theory, academic writing, or practical theater technique. It is, however, all of these things combined and more—a highly informative, thought provoking book about the possibilities of the medium of theater in America today.