The actor depends wholly on himself. He gives his performance in what, to him, seems the most effective manner.
We always had chocolates and my mother was careful to make sure they were unwrapped in advance so the paper wouldn’t rustle in the middle of a performance.
It would have to be connected with performance art somehow, either in the front of the house or the back. I was myopic about this from fourth grade on.
That’s the only way to do it. Just like an actor. You can get a great performance if you do a bunch of takes and edit it. You find the moments and string them together.
If you go on stage with the wrong attitude, or something in your performance is off, you can lose an audience in the first minute. That first minute is crucial.
Every performance is always new, because it just depends on who is summoned by the Fox God.
It’s always been performance art, but now it’s on a different level.
Comedians work great as actors because they’re good under pressure. With a lot of actors, you have to make them feel like everything’s going really well to get a good performance out of them. But, if you have a comedian on the set, you can tell them, ‘Hey, you really are screwing this up,’ and then they just get better.
I generally find an affinity with a lot of the people I play and I suppose if I didn’t feel an affinity for them then they wouldn’t be particularly good performances.
All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That’s the difference between mere theater and performance art.
Performance art is going to be the future. Plays on Broadway are so restricted. But performance art is like haikus, just one line thing. And it’s more casual but more interesting.
Every human being must have boundaries in order to have successful relationships or a successful performance in life.
A hedge fund manager whose clients demand monthly performance reports has different needs than any individual investors with a 20-year time horizon. The needs of that long-term investor differ markedly from someone who is retiring in three years.
Endorsements are a reward for good performance on the field, and the commitments made after signing them need to be done.
What you have in Scotland is an unpredictability with surfaces – and I’ve already said you don’t get good games on artificial turf – and that can affect performances and results.
The performance of a music director should be judged in a holistic manner, which includes songs as well as background score.
Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
I went to a performance of ‘The Crucible’ at the Guthrie when I was a sophomore in high school, and I knew right away that that’s what I wanted to do.
I guess why the Ocean’s films are hard for me is because on the one hand you have to make sure the performances are there, but on the other hand it’s a film that demands, to my mind, a very layered and complex visual scheme. That takes a lot of time to figure out.
My job as a performer is to make sure that whatever happens in a performance lives in somebody else, that it’s memorable… If you forget tomorrow what you heard yesterday, there’s really not much point in you having been there – or me, for that matter.
People come up to me as I leave the stage after a performance and tell me tey saw my mother onstage with me every time I sing. I keep a sense of humor about it.
Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to the bar on the corner and hear music. It was available for a fifteen cent beer.
I’ve done scenes in films that I felt like the performance was better in certain takes, but they couldn’t use them because it didn’t match what the person was doing when they came around and the camera was on them.
You have to be a student of the game to be successful, and it’s promising when you can say that, with a world-record performance, I still have things to improve on!
All I’m interested in is putting in consistent performances. If awards come along with that, great. It means you are doing something right.
The more comfortable you are, and the more you can relax, the more truthful your performance is.
Clean living is the cardinal principle in the lives of the world’s greatest athletes, as the phenomenal performances of these outstanding characters will obviously show.
I love actors; I love seeing great performances. I just love that, when I’m seeing a performance, that inside me, I just go, ‘Oh my God, how are you doing that? Where is that coming from?’ Where you see an actor do something, and I can’t even locate it in my own body.
I’ve never been a really big fan of theatre. I don’t know why. It’s so much for effort. It’s much more difficult for me than stage acting just because of the pressure that’s piled on you and you have to learn the entire performance by heart.
What I really like seeing from the stage is people having their own moments, when people are doing some performance of their own.
Live performance is everything. First of all, I have terrible stage fright. But beyond that, once the music starts, it’s OK.
No one tells you what to do if you completely flop at the beginning of a performance.
Floyd Mayweather is in the sport to give great performances.
Being in a band was so fun and exciting, but I was just kind of focusing more on performance and wasn’t really writing the songs – I didn’t really think I had a voice.
My job is to improve the performance of the team game by game.
The highest levels of performance come to people who are centered, intuitive, creative, and reflective – people who know to see a problem as an opportunity.
True prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a vocal performance. It is far deeper than that – it is spiritual transaction with the Creator of Heaven and Earth.
You cannot increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. We improve the performance of farms by irrigating them and fertilizing them to provide all these nutrients. But we cannot keep on doubling the yield every two years. Moore’s law doesn’t apply to plants.
Puma was all about function and not at all about design. The founder of the company always believed functionality and performance were the only ingredients that could make Puma successful and design never mattered.
You have actors who begin at a certain young age and there’s very little change in their technique and the depth of their performances; they’re the same 30 years later.
I know what I want, and the performance side is more important than ticking the money box.
The opportunity to be a part of the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Rio is a huge milestone in my career, and it will be the biggest performance of my life.
Maintain ‘baseball cards’ and/or ‘believability matrixes’ for your people. Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.
I’d rather do my own performance than copy someone else’s.
You can’t, or you shouldn’t, be nominated for an Oscar unless you’ve turned in a performance that’s special.
Passion and true passion is actually very unpredictable. It heads in unexpected directions because it’s constantly seeking out new challenges. But what’s really interesting is that passion ultimately is necessary for sustained extreme performance improvement.
I like working with an actor who doesn’t do the oneupmanship. One who has no trick and gives a true, honest performance.
I really do believe that was what I was put on this planet to do: to give to people and, through my performances, show them another world – in the case of ’24,’ to show them what a politician, black or white, should be. Basically, I wanted to be a service to others.
I performed adequately at school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre.
Icy and earthy, Helen Mirren is a rare, regal presence in a movie age that values the plebeian over the patrician and mass over class. Lauded with an Oscar and an Emmy for playing both Queen Elizabeths, Mirren has matched her cool aristocracy with a boldness of performance and display.
I offer my performance as prayer for someone I’ve worked with as an actor or someone who has died. The image that comes into my head as I walk to the stage, I offer that performance up for that person.
One only has to look at the performance of the economy to understand how it shapes the perspective of America’s youth about military service.
Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.
For some artists the live performance is the chicken before the egg of writing or recording of repertoire. For other artists the writing or recording of repertoire is the chicken before the egg of live performance.
I was the worst extra, I was ‘that’ guy. I was the guy on the phone trying to get the Oscar for best extra – for best background performance.
Everybody uses mime and gesture in real life, though we don’t realize it. It’s very useful as a performance technique, though it can be boring to watch on its own.
