Quotes That Inspire Us...

"Allow me to propose a few suggestions about how to handle the natural resistances that your circumstances might offer. Do not assume that you have to have some prescribed conditions to do your best work. Do not wait. Do not wait for enough time or money to accomplish what you think you have in mind. Do not wait for what you assume is the appropriate, stress-free environment. Do not wait for maturity or insight or wisdom. Do not wait until you are sure you know what you are doing. Do not wait until you have enough technique. What you do now will determine the the quality and scope of your future endeavors."

-Anne Bogart

"We don't live for realities, but for the fantasies, the dreams of what might be. If we lived for reality, we'd be dead, every last one of us. Only dreams keep us going...When you are acting, don't settle for anything less than the biggest dream for your character's future."

-Michael Shurtleff

"The education of an actor in our theatre is not a matter of teaching him something; we attempt to eliminate his organism's resistance to this psychic process. The result is freedom from the time-lapse between inner impulse and outer reaction in such a way that the impulse is already an outer reaction. Impulse and action are concurrent: the body vanishes, burns, and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses. Ours then is a via negativa - not a collection of skills but an eradication of blocks."

- Jerzy Grotowski

"I want to create theatre that is full of terror, beauty, love and belief in the innate human potential for change. In dreams begin responsibility.”

-Anne Bogart

"Theatre remains the only thing I understand. It is in the community of the theatre that I have my being. In spite of jealousies and fears, emotional conflicts and human tensions; in spite of the penalty of success and the dread of failure; in spite of tears and feverish gaiety, this is the only life I know. It is the life I love."

-Robert Helpmann

"I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness to insist on and live the life of the imagination.  A painting has to be the experience instead of pointing to it.  I want to have and give access to feeling.  That is the riskiest and only important way to connect art to the world - to make it alive.  The rest is just current events."

-David Salle

"Theatre is like a virus: once you get it you can't get rid of it."

-Robin Boisseau

"You cannot create results. You can only create conditions in which something might happen."

-Anne Bogart

"A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance."

-Dario Fo

"One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap."

-Stella Adler

"Any great work of art...revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."

- Leonard Bernstein

"In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations."

-Anne Bogart

"The stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. These thoughts are what words cannot express and which, far more than words, would find their ideal expression in the concrete physical language of the stage."

-Antonin Artaud

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"The creation of art is not an escape from life but a penetration into it."

-Anne Bogart

"Why do we sacrifice so much energy to our art...?

Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and repeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance or lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves...art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light."

-Jerzy Grotowski

"The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre."

-Artonin Artaud

"A nation that does not support and encourage its theater is -- if not dead -- dying; just as a theater that does not capture with laughter and tears the social and historical pulse, the drama of its people, the genuine color of the spiritual and natural landscape, has no right to call itself theater; but only a place for amusement"

-Federico Garcia Lorca

"It is easy to coast through life rather than find the will to continually reach out into the world.  To reach out is to risk.  There is little grace in a life that never extends out beyond the boundaries of self."

-Anne Bogart

"[Human beings] will begin to recover the moment we take art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money."

-Ernst Levy

"I believe that theatre's function is to remind us of the big human issues, to remind us of our terror and our humanity. In our quotidian lives, we live in constant repetition of habitual patterns. Many of us sleep through our lives. Art should offer experiences that alter these patterns, awaken what is sleep, and remind us of our original terror. Human beings first created theatre in response to the everyday terror of life."

-Anne Bogart

"If I were to express all this [acting theory] in one sentence I would say that it is all a question of giving oneself. One must give oneself totally, in one's deepest intimacy, with confidence, as when one gives oneself in love. Here lies the key. Self-penetration, trance, excess, the formal discipline itself - all this can be realized, provided one has given oneself fully, humbly and without defense."

-Jerzy Grotowski

"The text is simply the outline, the form.  The form which does not become something truly alive until it is filled in with the necessity of emotion, thought, or meaning.  Source-work, the Viewpoints, and Composition are also only maps.  Tools and ladders.  They provide a structure for the artist so she can forget about structure.  They are there to free her up from the much more difficult, consuming task of expression, of getting in touch with and communicating the stuff of the soul.  They exist in the service of Art."

-Tina Landau

"That's what our work can do: we remind people that things can change, that wounds can heal, that people can be forgiven, and that closed hearts can open again."

-Larry Moss

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.  Art is knowing which ones to keep."

-Scott Adams