Mary Overlie
[1] Overlie received two Bessie Achievement Awards, the first for creating the Studies Project, shared with Wendell Beavers, and the latter for her life-time contribution to dance.
She collaborated with Lee Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis, David Warrilow, Ruth Maleczech, Anne Bogart, Yvonne Rainer, and Barbara Dilley.
[1] In 1969, Dilley invited Overlie to make a performance for the Whitney Museum in New York City as a part of her improvisational dance company, Natural History of the American Dancer.
[citation needed] Overlie continued as a member of the Natural History of the American Dancer with Carmen Beauchat, Cynthia Hedstrom, Judy Padow, Rachel Lew and Suzanne Harris from 1970 to 1975.
[1] In 1974, Overlie cofounded Danspace Project, a dance-presenting organization, at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery with New York School poet Larry Fagin [9] and choreographer Barbara Dilley.
[2] Sylvère Lotringer interviewed Overlie for Semiotext(e) edition Notes on the Schizo-Culture Issue (1979) alongside Jack Smith, Philip Glass, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Robert Wilson, John Cage and other leading philosophers and artists "that had already devoted their thought to the perpetual collapsing of borders.
[9] The Mary Overlie Dance Company (founded 1978), included original members Paul Langland, Wendell Beavers, and Nina Martin.
Her work with Mabou Mines also included collaborations with director JoAnne Akalaitis on the theatrical productions Cascando (1977), Dressed Like an Egg (1978), and Dead End Kids (1983) at The Public Theater.
[1] She was the director of the Experimental Theater Wing Paris program from 1985 to 1987 and by invitation oversaw the creation of the Pro Series Internationale Tanz Wochen Wien in Vienna, Austria (1989) where she met and organized workshops taught by Susanne Linke, Karine Saporta, Ismael Ivo, and Merce Cunningham among others.
She toured performing her solo-pieces Small Dance (1989), History (1997), and Location of Love (1998), and worked as a freelance teacher in France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Austria, and the Netherlands.
[2] Overlie founded the Six Viewpoints Studio at Tisch School for the Arts in 2006 and continued teaching at The Experimental Theater Wing until 2015 when she retired and moved to Bozeman, Montana.
[20] For Overlie, this shift in attention re-defines art and the role of the artist from a "creator/originator" mindset to what she called the "observer/participant", which centers on "witnessing, and interacting, ... working under the supposition that structure could be discerned rather than imposed".
The information of space, the experience of time, the familiarity of shapes, the qualities and rules of kinetics in movement, the ways of logic, how stories are formed, the states of being and emotional exchanges that constitute the process of communication between living creatures ...
