Friday Arts Quotes: Slings and Arrows Season 1

Ever since I got to Kamloops I have been missing live theatre. It's been a month since I've seen a show and will be another month until I see another. In an effort to appease my soul's desire to see live shows, I've been watching Slings and Arrows. If you've never heard of the show, it's time you watched it. All of it.

In the meantime, let me present you with a couple of quotes from the first season when the fictional theatre company produces "Hamlet".

"Cheer up, Hamlet; chin up, Hamlet; buck up, you melancholy Dane! So your uncle is a cad who murdered Dad and married Mum. That's really no excuse to be as glum as you've become! So wise up, Hamlet; rise up, Hamlet; perk up and sing a new refrain. Your incessant monologizing fills the castle with ennui. Your antic disposition is embarrassing to see. And by the way, you sulky brat, the answer is to be! You're driving poor Ophelia insane. So shut up, you rogue and peasant; grow up, it's most unpleasant; cheer up, you melancholy Dane!"
- Act 1 Theme Song

"There are some of you who will be terrified to learn that I'm going to take over direction of this play. There are others who will be thrilled because they know that in my production there will be little danger of you stepping in a pile of horse shit. But I think that there is one thing that both, the pro-Geoffrey and the anti-Geoffrey, camps can agree upon and that is, that my reason may very well be hanging by a thread. Well, my friends, it is my belief that the best of happens just before the thread snaps"
- Geoffry Tennant

Friday Arts Quotes: R&G Edition

In the past two weeks of rehearsing Rosencrantz & Guildenstern I've picked out a handful of my favorite quotes, some about what it means to be actors and others just because they make me smile. Enjoy.

"We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do onstage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else." - Player, R&G

"We're the actors - we're the opposite of people" - Player, R&G

Friday Arts Quotes: You Still Can't Edition

With only 3 performances left of You Still Can't at Pacific Theatre, I bring you an all YSC version of Friday Arts Quotes.

Grandpa Tony: "Working against something you believe in. That's not good for a person's soul. What'll you have to take home with you at the end of it all?"


Norman: So you actually got to work with Philip Glass?
Dylan: You will recognize something of a cyclical organizing principle, and would be correct in any conjecture with regards to a certain Glassian influence.
Norman: Cool! Ripping off the greats!
Dylan: I think of it as a consciously post-modern referentiality -"

Photo: Sasha (Laura VanDyke) encouraging Dylan (Brett Ziegler) to sign the Dylan poster for Norman's (Tim Bratton) pseudograph display.

(Cut from the play) Norman: "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing"

The Return of Friday Arts Quotes!

After a hiatus, Friday Arts Quotes are back!

"Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process." - Peter Shaffer

"I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence." - Tom Stoppard

"If you want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, be an audience. " - Tallulah Bankhead

Friday Arts Quotes: Stop Kiss Edition

From the producers notes in the program for Stop Kiss (opens tonight @ the Havana)

"This play struck a cord with our hearts & simultaneously an innocent face was struck in the city. With that in mind we decided this story needed to be told. It's a love story. Simple as that. Too often we hear of hate crimes that happen & all we focus on is the hate. We world like for you to sit back in this dark space & let us remind you of someone you love, that loves you back... just the way you are."

Friday Arts Quotes

"A play's got to be a dramatic event, not a lyrical event. It's not music, it's not poetry, it's not dance, it's not narrative - it's dramatic...it's about conflict. It's about forces coming together."
- Romulus Linney

"When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens."
- Madeleine L'Engle

"Learning to write for the theatre is learning to be a human being, because the theatre by its very nature makes you deal with other human beings."
- David Ives

Friday Arts Quotes

"A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great." - Arthur Miller

"The primary function of a theatre is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent." - Robert Brustein

"I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act." - Orson Welles

Friday Arts Quotes

"I regard theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being" - Thorton Wilder or Oscar Wilde (attribution debated)

"Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.” - Henry Miller

“You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film -- you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.” - Daniel Day-Lewis

Friday Arts Quotes: World Theatre Day Edition

"The survival of the art of theatre depends on its capacity to reinvent itself by embracing new tools and new languages. For how could the theatre continue to bear witness to the great issues of its epoch and promote understanding between peoples without having, itself, a spirit of openness? How could it pride itself on offering solutions to the problems of intolerance, exclusion and racism if, in its own practice, it resisted any fusion and integration?"- Robert LePage, 2008 International Message

"The world has never before had as much drama as today. Radio, films, television and video inundate us with drama. But while these forms can engage or even enrage the audience, in none of them can the viewer’s response alter the artistic event itself...That is why theatre is signing its own death warrant when it tries to play too safe. On the other hand, that is also the reason why, although its future often seems bleak, theatre will continue to live and to provoke." - Girish Karnad, 2002 International Message

"The imagination cannot lie. It reveals our psychology, our abidding or passing anxieties, the concerns of man in every age and of the present time, the depths of the human soul. A person who does not dream is a sick person. Dreams perform an essential function and the function of the imagination is no less essential. An artist whose freedom of imagination is threatened becomes alienated. The great revolutionaries and their precursors were dreamers." - Eugene Ionesco, 1974 International Message

"Lastly, I believe that theatre is the light that illuminates the path of mankind. A light that ensures an organic link with the spectator by creating warmth between us — be that communication through the written text or through the performance on stage." - Fathia El Assal, 2004 International Message

Friday Arts Quotes

"Fringe theatre, playing in small and unlikely places, happens all over the country. It is fitful, but then it should be. Wonderful things occur alongside terrible things. But the vitality exists because of the support of the actors. They are the subsidy. They often put up with the humiliation of working for no money - or just for bus fares, becuase they believe." - Peter Hall, The Necessary Theatre

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things. - Pablo Picasso

Friday Arts Quotes

Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people - Alice Neel

There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it. - Henry Moore

What works for acting works for life. To act brilliantly, to live fully, requires nothing less than the complete investment of your entire soul! What we do is holy! - Alice Saltzman

Friday Arts Quotes: Theatre Textbook Edition

If you went through any sort of post secondary theatre training as I did, you probably have a pile of text books kicking around. Of various sizes, shapes, & colors they sit on shelves waiting for their turns to be taken off & consulted as I run into various problems.

For today's edition of Arts Quotes I have turned to that pile & have picked out a few quotes that spoke to me as a student. Some of them I don't find particularly enlightinging today, but when I took the class 5 or so years ago, I seemed to think it was pretty worthwhile.

"We are makers of belief. The director is the one who believes first....He has to believe that he could stand on the corner and sell it, that he could market it, that he could convince people of the beauty, that he could stop passersby and say, "Did you ever wonder about the possibility of this? Isn't this beautiful? Doesn't this strike you as peculiar and wonderful?"
- William Ball, A Sense of Direction

"Playwrights, like all artists, create their works becuase they have something they feel compelled to communicate. Remember that what you come up with should be something you feel passionately about, something you believe in and can get emotional over."
- Buzz McLaughlin, The Playwright's Process

"People tend to dance around the most potent possibilities becuase they fear the monsters that might be lurking there."
- Buzz McLaughlin, The Playwright's Process

"If a performance is truly a collaborative effort, then all the artists and workers in the theatre can be considered performers."
- Oren Parker, Craig Wolf & Dick Block in Scene Design & Stage Lighting

Friday Arts Quotes: The Scripted Edition

This week's edition of Friday Arts Quotes features quotes from the stage, films & TV.

"You write your first draft with your heart but you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think" -William Forrester in Finding Forester

"Observation is a more powerful force than you could possibly reckon. The invisible, the overlooked, the unobserved are the most in danger of reaching the end of the spectrum. They lose the last of their light. From there anything can happen...lives altered forever by you. By the simple effect of being present, by entering the light, by joining the dance." - Old Lady God on Joan of Arcadia

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My arts quotes book is beginning to run out of fresh quotes. If you have any favourite arts quotes that you would like to see featured here, please send them to lois.dawson@mytwu.ca.

Friday Arts Quotes

"The poor need beauty as much as bread becuase they live in ugliness all the time." - Martin Luther

God comes to us in theatre in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity. - Julie Harris

Friday Arts Quotes

Just one quote this week, but a good one.

"All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older. But they start off without self-consciousness as they paint their purple flowers, their anatomically impossible people, their thunderous, sulphurous skies. They don't worry that they may not be as good as Di Chirico or Bracque; they know intuitively that it is folly to make comparisons, and they go ahead and say what they want to say. What looks like a hat to a grownup may, to the child artist, be an elephant inside a boa constrictor. So what happens? Why do we lose our wonderful, racketty creativity? What corrupts us?...A lot of my adult life has been spent in trying to overcome this corruption, in unlearning the dirty devices of this world, which would dull our imaginations, cut away our creativity." - Madeline L'Engle

Friday Arts Quotes: Opening Night Edition

It's opening night for Holy Mo at Pacific Theatre, so in honor of that, this week's arts quotes are all about audience - the theatrical ingredient that gets added on opening.

"The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his life time; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work had been still-born. The reader, viewer, listener, usually grossly underestimates his importance. If a reader cannot create a book along with the writer, the book will never come to life....The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words. So there is no evading the fact that the artist yearns for "success," becuase that means that there has been a communication of the vision: that all the struggle has not been invalid." - Madeline L'Engle

"When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, "We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world." If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that." -David Mamet

"You need three things in the theatre - the play, the actors & the audience - and each must give something." - Kenneth Haigh

Friday Arts Quotes: Critics Edition

In theatre we seem to have this love/hate relationship with the critics and there is a moment in the show I'm working on that pokes a bit of fun at that. But I'm not going to go into that here. I don't need to. Simon already wrote a great post about it back in spring over at The Next Stage" entitled Critics are your friends. Meet your new friends."

This week's quotes are about critics as they apply to all forms of art: writing, fine arts, music, theatre, opera, dance, and every melding of the above.

"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.”—John Steinbeck

"Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works."—John Keats

"The history of criticism begins with the history of art. When the first artist drew his first horse in red chalk on the walls of his cave, the first critic was at his elbow.”—Robert Morss Lovett

"A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded."—Murray Kempton

“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.” - Carl Jung

Friday Arts Quotes: Holy Mo Edition

"It isn't easy traveling around the world in a circus wagon with a couple of clowns. The only reason Follie, Bufoona and Guff are still together is because they love each other and need each other, they are family. It hasn't been easy touring all these years, dust in their nostrils as they pull their wagon across windy prairies, through hostile villages, over skin cracking sand dunes and up mad rutted mountain trails. As Follie sings for tomato slinging tavern sailors, she remembers that she could be making a lot more money dong cartoon voice overs. Bufoona pulls out a ratty picture of Cirque de Soliel on nights when audiencese cough, shuffle and move along. When rain starts to fall during the parting of the red sea and soot fingered boys steal backstage props, Guff remembers how much she got paid as a roadie for the Rolling Stones. So why do they do it? The story. They are more than just performers, they are prophets. Sometimes, when they sing around the camp fire, bells will come after quiet thunder and the presence of Yamma will fill the circle. Follie might see a vision, Bufoona might dream a dream, or Guff might burst into ecstatic dancing under the stars. Either way, they seek an undeniable ferociously beautiful Other and their stories are an invitation to the whole world to dance with the Divine."

- Lucia Frangione, Playwright's Notes, Holy Mo (Emphasis mine)

Friday Arts Quotes

"Every real creation of art is independent, more powerful than the artist himself and returns to the Divine through its manifestation. It is one with man only in this, that it bears testimony to the mediation of the Divine in him." - Ludwig von Beethoven

I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least. -Eugene Ionesco

Friday Arts Quotes: Boxing Day Edition

This week's Friday Arts Quotes come to you with a Christmas theme.

Charlie Brown on Directing:

"One of the first things to insure a good performance is strict attention to the director. I'll keep my directions simple. If I point to the right, it means focus attention stage right. If I make a slashing motion across my throat it means cut the scene short. If I make a revolving motion with my hand, it means pick up the tempo. If I spread my hands apart, it means slow down. It's the spirit of the actors that counts, the interest that they show in their director. Am I right? I said, am I right?"

- Charlie Brown, in A Charlie Brown Christmas

And let me give a tiny bit of context to this second quote: Liz is an aspiring actress who has just had her vision of what theatre is shattered by a crass director.

“I’ve always thought about the theatre like a Christmas tree, all shining and bright with beautiful ornaments. But now it seems like a Christmas tree with the tinsel all tarnished and the colored balls all fallen off and broken. That’s a corny way of saying it, but you know what I mean.”
“Sure, I know what you mean, Liz. And it’s both ways . . . Some of the ornaments fall and break and some stay clear and bright. Some of the tinsel gets tarnished and some stays shining and beautiful like the night before Christmas. Nothing’s ever all one way.You know that. It’s all mixed up and you’ve just got to find the part that’s right for you.”

- Liz & Ben in The Joys of Love by Madeline L'Engle