Quotes About Performance

like it when I hear this process called "montage." It seems to convey the hope that the whole will add up to even more than the sum of its parts. Film is visual music. It's put together with more than logic and announces when it's right. Many a performance can be made or destroyed by what is left in or cut out.

You have to fool yourself before you can fool the audience.

John and Paul always had a special link between them, a chemistry that added to the heat: they knew intuitively how to share the stage and the limelight, how to spar with each other and how to play the audience so that the girls went wild.

High-performing people are good at staying almost exclusively focused on what they are responsible for and what they can do right here, right now.

Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform is always inferior to what we imagine.

The relationship with a live audience seems to me to count for more.

Perché bisogna portare con sé la propria vita come uno spettacolo effimero e invisibile agli altri?

I do love playing aristocrats, probably because it's so against type. So much more interesting than playing a version of yourself.

I think actors go along a continuum from Simon Callow down to kind of Ross Kemp, and I like to think of myself as the Ross Kemp of comedy. He's very good in 'East Enders' because he plays a version of himself. I think I can play a version of myself - that's about all I can do.

I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren't hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they're excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.

As a black woman who grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood, you learn how to perform a 'good' version of yourself. And then when you're with your home girls, you're saying all kinds of stuff that sounds all kinds of crazy, but you understand each other because you're speaking the way that you're comfortable with.

A sketch should be about two to three minutes, which is basically what most songs are. They're usually done by groups. Good examples of each build and have different parts and twists in them. I guess sketch would be the comedy version of music.

My version of lip-synching is singing full-out with the track.

Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.

I think that what we were doing with the live musical version of 'Shrek' was taking the ideas and the structure of the movie and not necessarily reinventing it but reimagining it. It is a very different medium to perform.

I played Jonathan Livingston Seagull in a musical version of 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' in Austin, TX. It was pretty special.

The most important thing you can do as a performer is to be yourself, or be an onstage version of yourself. If you're not being true to yourself, and somebody likes that other version of you, you're kind of stuck.

When you are playing somebody who did exist, and there is good source material on them, whether it is a biography or archives or experts, you would be stupid not to delve into them. But there is a point in the process where you leave the books alone, and instead, you focus on the script and creating your version.

A rap is a tweaked version of comedy, because comedy came first. People weren't spitting before they were doing comedy. Comedy has been relevant for years. It's the same art form, pretty much. Discovering that and applying it, I think that has made my stand-up better.

I started out in the theater, and my background is classical. I'd love to be in a film version of a Shakespeare play.

Have you seen the Broadway version of 'The Lion King?' Go and see it. That's where the future of musical is.

Even on the stage, I've played a bit of a persona, and the persona I played was a much brasher, more arrogant, less aware, less educated version of me.

I've always been an actor, even when I was doing improv and my own version of stand up.

I was on 'Junior Star Search' when I was 10 years old, in the acting category. The adult version of 'Star Search' didn't have an acting category, but for the kids, they had an acting category. It was the strangest thing. It was full blown 1980s, with big hair, mullets, and the whole deal.