Quotes About Performance

Night is the magician of the fair.

He was really having a hard time with this. He was not a seductive kind of guy, and if he tried to be sexy, he was going to sound like Romeo, the porn version.

Only by proper performance in a social context does the individual fashion and renew himself by purposeful action in a world of shared meaning.

in order for this power to truly captivate us, it has to be generated in the creation of meaning and in social performance

Some are more fortunately endowed to set the implicit tone for the performance because they present a model self. The less fortunate are obliged to dance a lifetime to the performance cues of others.

It was not brilliant bull-fighting. It was only perfect bull-fighting.

He bowed at the dark, straightened, tossed his hat over his shoulder, and, carrying the muleta in his left hand and the sword in his right, walked out toward the bull.

I don't have to be proud of it. I only have to do it well. – Thomas Hudson

The whole thing seemed to run better while I was away.

that most exciting perversion of life; the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing.

your own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty.

He is performing a work of art and he is playing with death, bringing it closer, closer, closer, to himself, a death that you know is in the horns because you have the canvas-covered bodies of the horses on the sand to prove it. He gives the feeling of his immortality, and, as you watch it, it becomes yours. Then when it belongs to both of you, he proves it with the sword.

One of the major differences between ritual and theatre is that in ritual one communicates with the gods whereas in theatre communication is established with a human audience

We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.

But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more formidable arbiter. Medicine knows how to scare even those who scoff at religion. Compared with a diagnosis, what's a mere sin? We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.

the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality.

That's the point of acting: to bring about awareness of humanity, to conjure compassion, and to alleviate shame.

the theater is the living consciousness of the world.

Ulla Sallert, wearing one of her famous facial expressions with about eleven ambivalent meanings and twenty-three enigmatic nuances, drops into a deep curtsy.

Layton combined dialogue, song, and dance in a fluidly shifting action

Jane Eyre, Thou Shalt Not, and Thoroughly Modern Millie typify currents running through the musical today: one, the extra-musical musical play that encroaches on opera; two, the rehabilitation of dance after years of neglect; and, three, the musical-comedy revival.

The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!

She probably doesn't think she can multitask well, but under pressure her bandwidth is enormous.

This is some next-level Lance Armstrong bionic shit going on.