Quotes About Performance

It is surprising, in the welter of questions that one gets at (languor), how few actually relate to the performance of the company, or the decisions taken by the board in particular areas.

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the "naturals," the ones who somehow know how to teach.

A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.

Our Garrick's a salad; for in him we see, Oil, vinegar, sugar and saltiness agree

Going to Coachella tomorrow; I heard Tupac might stagedive.

My play was a complete success. The audience was a failure.

There are more bad musicians than there is bad music.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding, sings.

It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

My act is very educational. I heard a man leaving the other night saying, 'Well that taught me a lesson'.

With the money I'm making, I should be playing two positions.

A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.

The drivers have one foot on the brake, one on the clutch, and one on the throttle.

Any time Detroit scores more than 100 points and holds the other team below 100 points, they almost always win.

In school I was never the class clown, but more the class trapeze artist. I was always being suspended.

An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.

I've always felt toward the slightest scene, even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say, 'Hi ' that the people ought to get their money's worth and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me.

If I play a stupid girl and ask a stupid question, I've got to follow it through, what am I supposed to do, look intelligent?

What you're doing is not important. What is really important is the state of mind from which you do it. Performance

It taught me that the process was more important than the result, just as the performance means more to me than the object. I saw the process of making it and then the process of its unmaking. There was no duration or stability to it. It was pure process. Later on I read—and loved—the Yves Klein quote: "My paintings are but the ashes of my art.

Human beings are afraid of very simple things: we fear suffering, we fear mortality. What I was doing in Rhythm 0—as in all my other performances—was staging these fears for the audience: using their energy to push my body as far as possible. In the process, I liberated myself from my fears. And as this happened, I became a mirror for the audience—if I could do it, they could do it, too.

We never rehearse the full time. Yesterday we rehearsed only ten minutes. I don't want him to rehearse 30 minutes [of silence]. Why? Because from my performance experience, I realize that you absolutely have to rely on the energy of the public. If you just sit [in] the empty space for the 30-minute rehearsal, this is pure torture.

Early on, I had to perform wherever I had the possibility. My audience was anything from 10 to 40 people. Then I started getting invited to the festivals, finding curators interested in presenting new forms of art, and going to important exhibitions. So many artists don't have that kind of stamina. They need collectors to buy the work or galleries to take care of them. I didn't have a gallery for at least 30 years. I had to do everything myself.