Mark Morris Quotes

We never notate our music, so you can try to replicate it, but you don't really have it.

Being on stage is not creating, it's re-creating.

Playing live is great, but it's not a creative thing, really. It's a reproductive thing.

My take is that acting is acting. A performance is a performance. With performance capture, if you don't get the performance on the day, you can't enhance the performance.

People are used to us being onstage for a while.

If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.

I don't think I'm an entertainer. I never think, 'Wow, I can't wait to get the crowd moving.' Some of my favorite bands never moved an inch.

The best way to refine an interpretation is by getting out and performing.

For me, acting is doing.

I think I have always tried to connect my comedy to my art.

I do my best creating on stage.

Doing a scene truthfully is very similar to doing a song truthfully. They're really parallel.

When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.

I'm kind of big on performance in general. I like the sort of entertainment where you can go in and be fully immersed in it.

I started using film as part of live theatre performance - what used to be called performance art - and I became intrigued by film.

It might sound glib, but in a sense, as an actor I'm a journalist and a psychologist recording life and truth.

Acting is acting.

Anything you can do to express yourself is a form of art. That's why I love my craft so much. I always wanted to play other artists. If I can't play an instrument, then I want to play a character that can. There is an artist behind everything, and I think that's beautiful.

And, you know, I think the original recording of Ravel's Bolero, probably whoever played percussion on that, will never have It played better than that.

Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.

I love being on stage more than anything, and I think that's what comes across. I think the most honest representation of any music is to play it right there in front of people. It's a moment - it's all one of a kind, every little part of it. There's no repeat.

Intimacy comes from being yourself on the stage and making the audience feel, without trying, that you're sittin' down there with 'em, playing, and that can happen in a big hall, if you have a good audience that want to listen.

I guess because you study the character and you do all those things. But when it comes down to it, it's still my performance, it's still my interpretation. I'm not going to, you know, be a clone - well, I was a clone of Richard Dean Anderson!