People expect that I’ll be just perfect on ice, and that’s not the case. I make mistakes, too. When I review my performance, sometimes I feel I did awful. That’s the whole part of the process of what people see when I’m performing.
I am comfortable performing now. I love it!
Performing is my passion. Being onstage is at once exhilarating, beguiling, and fulfilling. But it’s hard.
We can’t afford to let high performing talent just walk away from our companies without providing an opportunity to work through family needs.
My songs are very personal, which means they are fantastically therapeutic to write, but performing them night after night is emotionally draining.
That’s when I’m at my rawest. When I’m performing with the band. It’s just like the groove is going, whether we’re fast or slow, I can just transport myself.
I think of myself as unconventional, I guess. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what’s expected – despite wanting to get some recognition through performing – but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.
If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a teacher, a history teacher. After all, teaching is very much like performing. A teacher is an actor, in a way. It takes a great deal to get, and hold, a class.
I didn’t know anything about Eliza when I first got the call about ‘Hamilton.’ Tommy Kail, the director, asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. I knew what he was talking about because I’d seen the video of Lin performing it at the White House for Barack and Michelle Obama.
I always have been an entertainer, whether it’s been joking or performing for people. And I always thought I had a talent, because I could rap and I could sing, and I did write. And all the other kids were going to college, but I just felt like I had to do this first, and if it didn’t work, then I would go to college.
The No. 1 criticism most managers get is that they don’t ever change or wait too long to make changes… It’s very simple: Either things are performing or they’re not. And if it’s not performing, we have to make changes.
I was painfully shy, so my aunt suggested to my mum that me and my brother go to Stage 84, a performing arts school in Yorkshire. I’ve probably romanticised it in my head, but I seem to remember that in the space of an hour’s drama workshop, I was transformed. I went in really shy, and I came out full of confidence.
I’m not performing anymore. I reveal myself to the audience. I reveal myself. That’s the show now.
As a performing group, the Beatles began by playing old rock favorites, for dancing, to tough audiences in Liverpool and Hamburg. When they began writing seriously, they discovered that they couldn’t compose in the early American rock tradition.
I adored my birth father and constantly worried that I was being disloyal to him and his schoolteacher roots if I spent too much time performing and enjoying it.
I come from a family rooted in the arts, so I think I naturally gravitated towards performing from an early age.
I try not to get carried away and to only focus on the team goals to keep winning, to keep performing to the best I can.
I hold all of the songs that I have had the pleasure of recording and performing in high regard.
I love singing and performing. I’m always singing. Even if I’m at school or in the car, I’m always singing. My mom said ever since I could talk, I was singing.
I enjoy recording and performing, but it’s the songwriting that I love most.
Performing is something that has really grown on me and become an important part of my life, which I didn’t used to feel. I didn’t used to want to really perform live a lot. It’s been an interesting adjustment.
If you play a doctor on TV, you probably shouldn’t try performing surgery.
When I went to university, I was a philosophy major, but because I’m not very bright I chose to study philosophy at a performing arts school, maybe because the philosophy program there wasn’t too rigorous or challenging.
I do eventually want to get back into performing, but right now it’s more fun for me to dance for myself.
I found that the same things I loved about performing were the things I liked about directing and creating a piece – striking a chord that was in tune with the world and was reflecting back what I saw, just from a different angle.
I listen to Prince on my iPad. And I use a Chords & Scales app to warm up before performing.
People have these incredible expectations. So instead of being inspired by, say, Joni Mitchell’s music, I look at it and say to myself, ‘I’m going to quit – why would I think of writing or performing after listening to that?’
I started out as a dancer as a kid; I’ve been dancing since I was 4. So, performing was always part of what I was. I don’t know if it I enjoyed the response I got from people or if I liked having an audience, but there’s something in me that wanted to perform.
Performing was how I was able to release this pain I had.
When people performing on the public’s behalf feel intimidated, it’s a sorry affair.
One of the most important elements in teaching, conducting, and performing, all three, is listening.
And what we’ve lost sight of is that performing manual labor with your hands is one of the most incredibly satisfying and positive things you can do.
I think I realized it was an art form at the beginning, but it took me a really long time before I was able to view what I was performing myself as an art form.
There are no taking days off. There are no distractions. If I had that, I physically wouldn’t be capable of going onstage and performing live theater. It’s extremely demanding. I have to be in ballet class every day.
As a teenager I was obsessed with music and with writing and performing songs.
I like performing, but I usually get really sick when I’m on tour, and it’s just hard.
I’ve been composing and performing for as long as I can remember.
For a while I was perfectly happy not performing with ‘The Who.’ From 1982 to 1989 I felt ‘The Who’ did not exist. I let the band go, in my heart. However, Roger Daltrey had other ideas. He would not let go.
A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.
It’s fun when you’re winning and performing well, but it’s also hard because now you get older, you got responsibilities.
It was in India that I started my acting career, courtesy of my parents, long before I set foot on stage in England. They headed a company of travelling players performing Shakespeare up and down the land.
Performing is an experience, for me, that is as humbling as it is energizing.
We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we’d been performing that, but we don’t do that any more.
For me, I live for performing live because people look at magicians on television, and they always wonder, ‘Is it a camera trick?’ ‘Is it a stooge?’ whereas, live, they know there’s no set-ups; there’s no stooges.
I started traveling, performing, doing photo shoots and working on new music. At the same time, I was juggling homework and trying not to miss out on too many experiences during my junior and senior years – like prom and graduation.
The first duty of society is to give each of its members the possibility of fulfilling his destiny. When it becomes incapable of performing this duty it must be transformed.
Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.
Basically, Aristotle believed that every time you behaved unkind and immorally – performing actions your soul was not proud of – you tarnished your soul. The worst shape your soul became in, the worst shape your mood and spirit.
I’ve been working at performing for five years now. I’ve been working in Australia and Spain and England. When I was only 15 or 16, 1 was performing in bars; I could have had legal problems, but it’s also the only way to get to know what music is all about.
I thought acting was what grownups did. It was such a part of my childhood. I was already in love with performing before I knew there were other options. By then, it was too late.
I love performing and pretending – it’s very easy for me.
I started training again four months after giving birth, and it was strange not to be fully in control – I’m so used to my body performing at a certain level, but it wasn’t. I was like, ‘Oh, man, can we go back to where we were, please?’
The difference between burlesque and the newspapers is that the former never pretended to be performing a public service by exposure.
I was performing from the age of three.
Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician; the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand – the one doing the important job – unnoticed.
I love performing in New York. Just something about the energy that the crowd gives you, you give it back, a lot of interaction.
I really like performing for people.
Although I performed in high school, my first real experience with theater was performing with a student-run organization at Vanderbilt University called The Original Cast where I learned that I loved performing and especially loved theater people.
