The mind is a muscle.
Robert Wilson
Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated.
If you see the sunset, does it have to mean something? If you hear the birds singing does it have to have a message?
I think by drawing, so I'll draw or diagram everything from a piece of furniture to a stage gesture. I understand things best when they're in graphics, not words.
I did a masterclass at the Juilliard and asked the students, 'Can you stand?' 'Sure.' 'Can you walk?' 'Sure.' They couldn't. They had never really thought about it.
I don't see much difference between living and working. I think living is a part of my work. People often say, 'How can you work so much?' I don't think about it as work. I think of it as a way to live.
If you take a Baroque commode and put a Baroque clock on top of it, maybe it is not so interesting as when you put a computer on top of it. Then you see both items in a new way.
We're so afraid to lose the audience. Let the audience go.
The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.'
When we look back at the Mayans or ancient Egypt, we look at their art.
My method is much like choreography. I don't sit at a table. I work in a room with people.
If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before.
When works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity.
The reason you work as an artist is to stay open and ask questions.
I grew up in a town where there were no galleries, no museums, no theaters - a very religious, ultraconservative community.
Light is architectural. It is sculptural.
I never studied theatre; I learned it by doing it. If I had studied theatre, I would not be making the kind of theatre I am making.
I want to work with Jay-Z.
Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of 'postmodern theatre'. So I said to my office, 'This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don't know what it means, but... they're paying me a lot of money, so I'll go.'
Actors always start with the voice and language. That's wrong. They should start with the body. The body is an actor's most important resource.
I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.
My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school.
I try to present something that is full of time. Not timeless, but full of time. I never like a work where we try to update it, but it's still not interesting to see a work that is dated. If one is successful, then a work can be full of time. And time is very complex.
I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.
What interested me was dance - the way that it was constructed with time-space constructions, and that it was abstract. I always thought: 'Why couldn't theater be that way? Or an opera?'
Yes, I've been in love, but I guess I'm too involved with myself and my work. I think I'm in love with my work, and I'm in love with the people I work with.
When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.
I had dinner with Marlene Dietrich in the early 1970s. I went to pick her up and she had someone with her, a dreadful man. He was writing a book about her, and he said to her, 'You're so cold when you perform,' and she said, 'You didn't listen to the voice.' She said the difficulty was to place the voice with the face.
I think that I've always been a kind of structured person.
There are schools teaching 'stage decoration' as a subject, and they actually call it that. I say: 'Burn those schools!'
What was very interesting to me about Clementine Hunter's work is that she couldn't read or write, and she has recorded history of the plantation life and the southern part of the U.S. - the cotton harvests, pecan picking, washing clothes, funerals, marriages - in pictures.
The landscape of Texas is in all my work. It's that light; it's that sky.
New York is very provincial. They're very cut-off; they don't have an awareness of so much that is going on in the world.
My tax dollar, which goes to New York State Council on the Arts, is by and large only spent to fund people from the state of New York! And you want to be the cultural capital of the world?
I think people are looking for an alternative to the fast pace of everyday life and entertainment.
I had no idea I was going to have a career in the theater. I did not plan it.
In Europe, unlike the States, they have a cultural policy.
I think that opera in Europe is 30 years ahead of America. There is a broader range of material presented to the public. They value contemporary opera.
To me, what is important in the theater is that we don't want to make a conclusion. We don't want to make a statement, don't want to say what something is. We want to ask, 'What is it?'
Sometimes, when we're very, very still, we're more aware of movement than when we make a lot of movement outwardly.
My work has always dealt with a kind of space that allows one to daydream.
My work is formal, not based on psychology.
By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we're going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell.
One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.
I'm an artist, not a philosopher.
The first thing you must know as an actor or director is the space you will inhabit. See the architecture; imagine where things can happen in space.
Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms - to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.
Everything in Wagner's work - the music, the acting, the staging - stemmed from the text. Everything served to interpret the text.
Counterpoint is difficult. I have been doing it since the beginning of my career. But it is not just taking any opposite. It is finding the right opposite.
If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.
