Concurrently with each initiative, London Performance Studios will be making available to the public a series of interviews with various partners, participants, and artists. These interviews, as part of London Performance Studios’ mission of organisational transparency, make the detailed thinking that informs each initiative accessible to everyone.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: We are now recording. Okay, so my first question is how did your experience with Mary Overlie before she passed away inflect or change your thinking about Viewpoints, and the training you’d previously done with the SITI company in New York?

VALERIE MCCANN: Well a few things come to mind on this, firstly to do with horizontality, and I think part of it comes from the fact that the SITI company are working with the Viewpoints and Suzuki and Tandem. So they come with this really intense, very vertical, very powerful Suzuki Energy, and they bring and integrate that into their Viewpoints practice, but also into the whole ethos of how they run their training. It’s really intensely disciplined—for example every time there's an exercise starting, you should be the first person to be running up to the space, you know, it follows a really clear New York working actor discipline. Which I really appreciated, it helped me immensely during a moment in my life when I felt like I didn't have a strong enough personal discipline—it really helped me connect to that kind of power, and that has stuck with me. In practical terms, they also really work to enact the philosophy underlying the Viewpoints, and this was very clear with Mary, because she’s almost the opposite of that super quick-moving energy—she would encourage you to take it really very slowly, to really cultivate listening and patience, and to focus on a much deeper kind of particalization where you move towards a very fine attention to detail and approach, in which ‘seeing’ comes into form through forgetting the name of the things one sees. And within that, things take as long as they take. You know Anne Bogart talks about the Viewpoints as developing a way to get ensembles working together and creating work fast, so that we don't have to spend years and years and years together developing our ensemble language in advance. It’s a language that can get people really listening and working together quickly, and its based on the idea that this is actually what it means to be efficient. They're trying to say that this might feel at first like it's taking a long time, but in fact you’re just gonna make it work, and it's all just gonna keep happening—there's this whole idea of efficiency and of pushing forwards. This idea of ‘sats’, Eugenio Barba's term, and of holding to the idea of a constant readiness like a diver that's about to dive off the diving board. That's always present in the way that they train. And Mary would say, "Yeah, it's just the opposite". I mean she would be giving a lecture, and she'd just pause, and then she'd say “slow thought”—because she was pausing to see what was percolating, before she would speak it out loud. So yeah it's all to do with time. Time is the biggest difference there.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: It's interesting what you had to say about the question of efficiency, because something that’s struck me over the last couple of months of spending more time with Katie Mitchell is that part of what she's proposing both in the book and through her teaching, has to do with making a laboratory process efficient for a commercial output. So it's like she's taking active analysis. She's taking what we might call a laboratory process, which takes two and a half years, and front-loading that in such a way as to attempt to get the same results in six weeks. So I resonate with what you're talking about. It's a kind of more experimental, more kind of laboratory, long-form process being re-packaged into something that's about a more efficient rehearsal procedure. There's a couple of terms that you mentioned that I wanted to ask a little more about: firstly horizontality, which obviously expresses a kind of relationship to space, but also a political position, versus what you were talking about in terms of the verticality of Suzuki, and then also you used this word particalization. I think it would be productive if you could talk through what this terminology means to you and your practice.

VALERIE MCCANN: So let's see, horizontality. It’s both really practical and then also political, in terms of how it places the actor in a process, and the way its elevating the actor to the same level as any other practicing artist. So the actor is not just a trained instrument for the great Director. Which is something you and I talk about together a lot. The actor themselves are the artist creators, but at the same time the actor is completely decentered, and is no or more or less important than the walls or the audience or the floor, or any music that is playing or not playing, or the text—everything that's happening in the space is... I wouldn't even want to say ‘important’, but it all has the potential to be equally interesting. And ‘horizontality’ as it were is an idea that kind of takes the pressure off—it means everything is on an equivalent plane, and that therefore I don't have to be the most interesting thing (object, person, entity) in the room—that actually my job is to be interested in everything else, to be really seeing and being seen at the same time. So it suggests a much more relational form of practice, and an equality of all things in relationship to each other, a horizontal plane of relating. For example with Mary, the types of physical conditioning training she recommends that would support the Viewpoints practice include Jean Hamilton Floor Barre, which is literally done laying down on the floor, and includes things like body and mind centering.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: And that's Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen?

VALERIE MCCANN: Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, yeah. And when you consider this in relation to Suzuki—and I think about a lot of this with Jerzy Grotowski too—whereby there's very much a connection to God or whatever, for lack of a better term, and then also really a connection to the center of the earth; it follows the idea that we should be both really rooted down and also really elevated up at the same time, and there's this real power in that strong center line, but that it is very... Like it's about power, right?  That's the word that keeps coming to mind when I think of Suzuki, and I'm sure a lot of people would describe it as a very powerful training too. The interesting thing is that it's also a vocal training. It's a speech training, and this is something that's really interesting to me, or for me in my own work, is thinking about actually how voice—speech, specifically, and written text—has the power to make the space completely collapse and lose the horizontal. Even the structure of the way that the voice works is a vertical structure, it's really ‘up and out’ as it were. So I'm always interested exploring the deeper you can get into it—how the longer that you're working with a Viewpoints practice, and as you start to bring in even just voice sounds, and then eventually other forms of speech, text, words, language, singing—how you still encounter moments where that can still be really relational and really horizontal, because I've seen it happen and it's really exciting.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Can you think of any kind of particular examples of that kind of moment?

VALERIE MCCANN: I can think of like a couple times, like just like two-second moments in the years when I was training in New York with the same group of people for a while, with the SITI company. I have this one memory of one of the guys I used to train with a lot, James Ryan Caldwell, who was also a playwright. I think his relationship with language was a bit more facile than maybe the rest of us, but there was one moment where he just whispered a few lines to a chair and it was like, you could tell he still knew exactly where we were, you know what I mean? It just came out of nowhere, he was really, really close, and in this tiny little whisper to the leg of a chair or something, a whole fucking universe opened up.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Wow!

VALERIE MCCANN: It helped me see the room in a way that I just hadn't before actually.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Yeah.

VALERIE MCCANN: The real masters of it actually are not Viewpoints practitioners per se, but they practice in a very similar style. I just saw Deborah do it in her solo last week, but it wasn't text, and it also wasn't a language that you would recognize—it was sort of like a song formed of sounds she’d created, but they were nonsense sounds. But she was still seeing and being seen with every single cell of her fabulous three-dimensional body, as the words came out—I could still see everything that was happening. As opposed to when you see this great movement sequence, and then the dancer talks, and suddenly you can't see anything anymore. Here I actually see more things become even clear, and even more high def, that's what I'm going for. Jeanine Durning, who has also danced in much of Deborah’s work and is now her rehearsal director for the Cullberg ballet, has explored this in her solo work, which we spoke about a little before too. She has this piece called Inging, which is also very much a practice—it’s not written text, but it is using language as she moves, so she's almost speaking and describing also what she is dancing with. And as this is happening, but also very much in relation to some other things that she's got going on in this space, she uses some recordings of herself that she loops. She’s also really speaking to the audience and working with them as much as for example the table or the chair, and so on.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: It's a way of trying to think around that text or spoken voice so it doesn't suddenly become the limit? 

VALERIE MCCANN: It's the hierarchy of story. The need to fix the story. So again, allowing sound and words, or even text, from which a story might also emerge—allowing story, as Mary would say, allowing the God of shape to just fall upon you. Allowing the story to fall upon you, allowing the given circumstances to work on you instead of you trying to ‘do’ the word, or produce the given circumstances.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: You mentioned Deborah Hay, and she maybe leads us back into your use of the word particularisation. Could you talk about how your experience with Deborah Hay and that kind of thinking and training intersects again with Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints, and the version of Viewpoints you learned with the SITI company?

VALERIE MCCANN: Yeah, this was really interesting because I hadn't trained in the Viewpoints for a few years formally in any way or even practiced very much, and this was a moment when I went to train with Deborah, who is again not a “Viewpoints-Viewpoints” teacher, and doesn't associate herself with that at all—she’s very much a choreographer. Deborah Hay was a little bit ahead of Mary Overlie in that whole New York scene. Her choreography is based in questions and prompts, and the primary prompt she uses is called “turn your fucking head,” which basically means: keep refreshing your field of vision in smaller and smaller increments, and allowing what you see to serve you. And the main question that she uses for this is: What if every single cell of my body can be served by how I see? So this drew me into thinking of my body as cellular, which again is very Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, it’s part of a while scene where people are really thinking about not so much about muscles and joints and arms and legs and how strong they can be in movement, but more about the body as trillions or hundreds of trillions of cells that are constantly responding to everything that's around me. I'm just constantly trying to refresh my field of vision in smaller and smaller increments. Mary Overlie would say that the only difference between us and the rest of the space is that we're just a more densely compact group of cells. She would use this term particalization, which sounds very much like Deborah's language, but involves thinking about how I'm working with shape, and how I get to this place where I'm experiencing shape as a real, cellular entity. I've been reading a lot of the physicist Carlo Rovelli in the last couple of months, who works on space time, which thinks of bodies not even as cells but as particles. And everything around us is just particles too, so even the relationship that I have to this table right now, as two shapes, is also the relationship of all of the particles and cells of my body dancing around. 'Cause they're all vibrating all the time too—even if it's a rock, it's still kind of moving and changing all the time. So when you think of yourself as particles or cellular, you really have this experience of nothing being fixed. 

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: What I’m interested in within what you're saying here, and I think this probably comes out of the experience of doing these Demidov workshops together, is this question of how given circumstances are perceived rather than performed.

VALERIE MCCANN: Yeah.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: In all of these practices the question of perception is sort of secondary; everyone talks about listening. And suddenly now, when you talk about perceiving, suddenly, we're also talking about the eyes much more, and about how the visual field interacts with the neuroscience of emotion, or the biomechanics of emotion. A turn towards perception is perhaps a really interesting new field of inquiry in terms of performance.

VALERIE MCCANN: I appreciate that, too. Deborah Hay and the Viewpoints practitioners I've trained with, both with the SITI company and with Mary, they all work very specifically with focus. In the SITI company they'll start working with a soft focus. Because really, it's not about actually blurring things but about pushing the limits of your periphery so that you can take in more and more of the space as you work. I think it's really connecting with proprioception, which has been particularly important in the last couple years of the pandemic, but even before that with our increased attachment to technology. I see it with my younger students, man, no fucking backspace at all. They're bumping into each other all the time. And I had that experience. The first time I was in a room with people after lockdown, where I was, like, "I mean, how many years—decades—have I've spent, literally just moving through space with people?" And I felt like I had blinders on. So it's very much about a training of proprioception. But its also about getting really specific about where your focus lies—near, mid range, far or infinite, and being able to start to play around with those and notice where your ‘grey zone’ is, so your point of focus when you're not focused on focusing. Is your grey zone really near or mid range? I'll go to far or infinite space because I think it's harder for me to feel present in near focus and not completely collapse.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: See this makes me think about the Stanislavski exercises and fields of concentration. Because there are other ways of framing these things, or again of being able to train your concentration to look first into a very small area, and then widen it out. But what's interesting again here is the question of choice within this, or of action—the sense that what I perceive is coming to me, rather than me actively choosing what my concentration might land on.

VALERIE MCCANN: Right. And for the actor this opens up even more possibilities.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Yeah, I know, absolutely. It reminds me of the Demidov etudes, when the teacher was saying you don't have to look so intently at your partner. You want to make yourself available to your own experience and to the people you’re working with. You want to like show that you're with them.

VALERIE MCCANN: Yeah, you're just performing presence, but you may not actually be present.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Yeah. And actually, as you were saying you’re expanding that field of proprioception to include everything in the room, to inform your connection with it  all. It’s a really interesting term.

VALERIE MCCANN: Yeah. Well, you get a full-body experience of what the relationship is. That, I think, just opens up more possibilities, at least in the etude work, that I don't think would be possible if you were just saying the lines and really looking at each other. You'd already start to get an idea of what you think it is.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Yes. It’s also connected to this idea of ‘performing presence’. So ‘If I'm looking at you, I am here’, whereas actually that might just be as de-centering for you, or for your ensemble member, as if you were doing a tap dance. I've got [Nikolai Vasilievich] Demidov in my mind at the moment! But it's also related to the culture of creative calm that he talks about, and the sense that it comes out of nothing—you just say it, just see. That calmness is parallel but distinct to relaxation, because people talk about relaxation, but relaxation and calm are very different things. I wonder what you think about this, about the ways in which the terminology that gets handed down and how this actually ends up creating limitations people may not even be aware of. For example you could say, "Oh, relax. You have to be relaxed." But, again, this already institutes a sense of "I must act upon myself in such a way. I must exert myself into relaxation."

VALERIE MCCANN: Yeah. No, it's the worst thing you can ever tell someone – to relax. [chuckle]

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Yeah. Just breathe. Relax.

VALERIE MCCANN: Just relax. Relax.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Just relax. Shake it off.

VALERIE MCCANN: I mean again, that’s just lazy art. You'll see lazy dancing, and you'll see bad Viewpoints. Because this particular form of practice is so open and available, but it's also really specific. You're always working with something and you're really clear about what you're working with, right? And if you're not clear about it, you're just noodling around.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Yeah.

VALERIE MCCANN: With Deborah Hay it's really, really clear—her questions are so specific. When you're training with her, she's constantly there. "Remember to turn your fucking head." [chuckle] And you see it in her work, that these people know what they're doing. I don't even know if it's dancing, but they're really concentrating on something. They're really interested in something. And it makes them fascinating to watch. The first time I saw Deborah's work the piece was O, O in New York, and it was the mid, late 2000s. I'd read her book My Body, the Buddhist, and I had heard about her because one of my teachers in the SITI Company, Barney O'Hanlon would talk about her a lot in our SITI Company training. And one of my best friends had done the solo commissioning project. I'd heard about how she works, but I had absolutely no idea what it was gonna look like. And that's the thing. I saw this piece, and I amazed—I’d never seen anything like it before. Every single dancer up there was so different and so interesting and really engaged in something. And I just found them captivating, but I was also like, "These are my people. These are a bunch of fucking weirdos." [chuckle] Just like... It looked like a whole company of beautiful aliens. And I was just like, "What are... What is their purpose?" Like the aliens that had landed. And Deborah herself will say that she wants to make something that doesn't look like anything that she's seen before, or you've seen before.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Wouldn't... I mean, isn't that the goal, right?

VALERIE MCCANN: Right? Yeah. Always.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how all of these disparate influences have coalesced into what you'll be doing in the room here at London Performance Studios on your Thursday workshops?

VALERIE MCCANN: Yes. So part of what I love about being able to do this space is that I'm not just working with actors or dancers, but that there's all types of artists in the room. And Mary Overlie would say that this practice is for any type of artist, or anyone who even is interested in art. Anyone who likes art would like to do this, or could gain something from doing this practice. It’s increasingly true for me too, which is why this true horizontality resonates with me personally—this practice really can be for anybody, you don't have to be trained in any specific physical discipline. You don't have to be able to do anything spectacular with your body. It really is about just expanding your relationship to everything around you.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: And how would that work in practice during one of your workshops in a really specific way? Take me through a typical workshop.

VALERIE MCCANN: Well, let's see. So, I'm trying to think of one we did a couple of weeks ago where I kind of framed it as “contents/container’, so I started with—and this is actually very Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen language—but I started with an exercise from Mary Overlie, called ‘automatic movement’ where you're starting from laying on the floor, eyes closed, and really just emerging from your lizard brain, trying to get just what the first impulse for movement is. It's usually pretty jerky, but you’re letting the body really just start to speak a little. It's lower brain movement, that's what it's called in Mary's book (Standing in Space). And then from there I went into trying to follow those pathways of lower brain movement, and see what they might wanna continue to express, looking for a little bit more almost like physical impulse work, which relates to Grotowski style, when you do Plastique River and stuff like that—following the impulses just through your body, but also really listening specifically to what the impulse is, because often, if anyone who does have a movement, any kind of movement training in their body will tend to become habitual. In this instance, if anything, someone with less training might have an easier time with this. We worked in kinetic movements where you find two specific body parts and they dance together, and then we expanded that out a little bit into then meeting the space with that dance. So that was like a good, the first half of the two-hour session, it was really just connecting to the impulses within the body and then starting to notice how they move through the space. And then the second part of the practice we focused on shape awareness, so starting from noticing just the shape, your body as pure shape, and all the different ways that you can bring that awareness and then allowing the shape to start to move, and then starting to notice the shapes in the space, the details of the architecture, and allowing the shapes to speak to each other through any movement that arises. So all of this is very much connected to a phrase that Deborah would use: “same experiment, totally different experience.” We're working from perception, so your body can respond to how it perceives and also how it can or wants to move within these questions, these experiential things.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: I was interested when you said that this is a kind of practice or thinking that is for anybody, like for any body, and then also talking about your interest in what you've called pure horizontality. I know that you’re also very interested in questions around access and disability as they relate to these practices; I wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit about those interests and how they’ve also been inflecting your thinking around it kind of synthesizing these different trainings into your own practice.

VALERIE MCCANN: Well, firstly, it's something that has become more and more part of my practice because it's just part of my life experience. I've had multiple surgeries and I experience chronic pain, so a lot of the ways in which I used to show up as a performer, specifically as a sort of physical theatre performer were very physically rigorous. And while I do appreciate rigour, and I enjoy still a physical challenge, that's not a sustainable way for me to create work anymore.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Some of the work that we have done together in the past tackles these questions. The roles that you've created in the work that we've done together have often been actually really stationary figures, whether that was in the bath tub in Prague, or into the wheelchair in MIT, and we used to talk about oceans rather than rivers.

VALERIE MCCANN: I think as a movement person, I've also really been moving away from being the person that is here to warm you up or physically train you or myself. I guess I'm not really interested in so much as physical training as embodiment.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Embodied perception maybe.

VALERIE MCCANN: These practices of perception as an invitation to embodiment, because that's an invitation to movement, right? Working specifically with actors, that's an invitation to an actor physicality or character physicality, that you're completely creating through these practices of perception, through heightening or researching your relationship to everything around you, because that changes your physical experience. It's that cellular experience. I just had the profound experience of my body being released from a primary experience of chronic pain through this type of work and actually I've found more freedom and lightness in my physicality simply through practices that weren't based on, "Exercise this muscle and relax that muscle," but instead “imagine if every single cell of your body is being served by how you see”. Experiencing the way that I like to think about shape almost, and understanding your skin as the area, the boundary sort of, or the meeting place, where you end and everything else begins. If I'm thinking about pure shape as really just an experience of all skin, all surface—and a surface just barely separating the cells of my body from the cells of the space around me—then everything that I experience in my body and physicality, including pain, changes. It feels different. My whole body feels different, and from then on it can also move differently.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: I don't suffer from chronic pain but I have a lot of experience with pain, particularly dental pain. What your saying reminds me a little bit of where pain becomes sort of blinding. What happens to that pain where you... I hesitate to use the word "refuse" because that maybe seems too kind of forceful, but if instead of shutting your eyes, you open your eyes to the world around you, then how does that experience shift?

VALERIE MCCANN: I would suspect that the reason why we close down perceptually when we're experiencing pain is almost like we're hiding to protect. So it's almost a courageous act, but I guess also, I think you're sending a different message to your nervous system when you open your perception up and say, "I have nothing to be afraid of." It's like, okay, well then I must not be in that much pain actually.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Because I can open my eyes.

VALERIE MCCANN: I may not be that afraid.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: And if you talk about this kind of cellular experience where you are opening up the rest of yourself, which may not be in pain to be able to perceiving the world around you, then what does that do to the cells that are experiencing the pain, the neurons that are firing the pain response.

VALERIE MCCANN: Well, again, if my hip is completely in a spasm and it's locked up, and I just keep going, "Relax, relax, relax, relax, relax, relax." You know what it's not gonna do? It's not gonna fucking relax.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: Yeah. [chuckle]

VALERIE MCCANN: But if I start to think of it not as a hip and some muscles that are tight but cells, then it becomes less rigid. And it becomes less fixed because you think of cells as always vibrating and dividing.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: And as a kind of membrane. You mentioned Grotowski and I know you have a lot of experience with that work as well—there’s something in what you were talking about about voice, and about the kind of pre-verbal sounds that you were talking earlier, that Deborah was working with or your friend Jeanine. Grotowski talks about Demidov, we're not talking about a lot of men here! But one of the Plastiques is called the river, right?

VALERIE MCCANN: Actually this has more to do with the way that Stephen Wangh teaches them—he was in Acrobat Of The Heart and at the Experimental Theater Wing at the same time as Mary Overlie. A lot of people have experienced their two trainings simultaneously when went through Experimental Theater Wing in those years. You start with Plastique work, which is about following the impulses in the head and the different parts of the body individually, and then you take some time to then watch, to just let the impulse go through the body and then follow them—so like for example a shoulder really wants to go over here and then, but now it's coming up to here, and my elbow wants to be here… That’s like the plastique river. And you can do that, you can do a river for a long time, and it can get really exhausting, but that's when images start to come up for some people.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: I think but what's interesting, I was trying to think that if we're delineating between the trajectories between these things. 

VALERIE MCCANN: What I'm thinking a lot about in the relationship of Grotowski work versus Viewpoints-based work is that you’re following and finding the impulses and the images from inside your body. When I was working with my students at ALRA  last term on kinesthetic response, we had this conversation. Whereas instead, I'm trying to get my impulses to move from outside of my body, so in one exercise called ‘flow’, if I'm going to stop or start moving again or change directions, it's because of something that I'm taking what's happening around me, and sometimes they might think I'm gonna go in one direction, but I have to respond because somebody else moves there—so you're just constantly noticing stuff. Like perhaps working with a movement in response to architecture or even shapes—two actors that are working with shape and then working their shapes in relation to each other. Again my impulse to move is actually really coming from my interest in something outside of myself, and not from my interest in what's coming from inside my shoulder. I think both are awesome… within my solo practice too, often when I was in my residency I would warm up with anywhere from a half hour to almost an hour of Plastique work. I made up this whole thing, and then I would go out into space, but it was really about like greasing up, oiling up all the parts inside and waking everything up inside. That's my own personal practice and I'm not really with that as much anymore, but yes.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: I was just thinking because when we were talking about a river versus an ocean, that it's ironic that one of the parts of Grotowsk’s method is called the ‘Riverorand', a river is always in action.

VALERIE MCCANN: It's linear.

THAN HUSSEIN CLARK: It's linear and always in action, it's like it is going from one place to another of its own volition. But the surface of the ocean—again, like the skin—is means by which we interpret the ocean's change. There's movement going on below, but the surface of the ocean is always reacting to forces outside of itself, whether that be the wind, whether that be the magnetic pull of the tides…

VALERIE MCCANN: The ocean is also just fucking vast, it's just endless. And that's also what this work, for me, feels like—vast and endless, in the sense of it being an impossible task, or a problem that will never be solved, and I will never tire of the task.