Keenen Ivory Wayans Quotes

You can't just sit there and do the lines. You have to do something revealing or unusual.

My taste comes from when I was 12 years old and saw Genesis or Laurie Anderson or some performance artist who had put paint on himself. I've seen a lot of theater, but that's not what woke up my taste to become a director; nontheatrical things were much more theatrical than the theater I was seeing.

My first gigs were at university: I'd dress up as Jesus, jump off a cross and dance to a Mick Jagger song. I don't know if it was funny or not, but it was a start.

'Hedwig' was pretty much all the things I wanted to do that other people said I probably shouldn't do: drag, punk rock, stand-up comedy... You know, combine them all in a thing that's supremely uncommercial from the objective point of view.

I just like being a social experiment sometimes. I really should not be allowed in public. But I just go out into the public just to see people's reaction.

I don't think anyone would bat an eye if I wrote a song.

I don't think shoving my butt into people's faces will tell them anything about who I am. How is that connecting to your audience? What is that doing for your music?

I don't think people want to see me as a regular guy; besides, I'm a regular guy in real life. I guess I just want to be reckless in my work.

When I was in my late 30s, I lit a figure on fire on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It was me, a friend, and maybe eight people, tops. There wasn't any premeditation to it at all. It was really just a product of San Franciscan bohemian milieu.

I try to make myself, and subsequently the audience, as uncomfortable as possible, whether it's completely desecrating a song they thought was one thing, or getting too drunk to really do a very good job.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

I think theatricality is just one way of performing. I don't think it's a better way or the way, but it's my way.

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.

It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money.

Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words.

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.

I've been getting in trouble my whole life and I really don't care what anybody thinks of what I do on stage as a comic.

All good art is an indiscretion.

All I really want to do is things I haven't done. 'I'm gonna put a paper bag on my head and be on the cover of 'Billboard,' see what I can get away with - if they'll let me.' And they let me. And I am literally giggling inside for, like, a month that I got away with it.

My dad was a theatrical guy. He wore a scuba suit one time because he said so-and-so was in the tank with the mayor. He didn't really care what people thought, so he was able to put himself out there. He didn't have a lot of shame, in a good way.

I'm all about risque - I love that stuff. I love to be creative - that's what the entertainment business is about.

I was always feisty, always that kid that would be on the porch with a hairbrush singing or rapping.

I made video art for quite a long time, and I made this video covering myself in burgers and dancing to Major Lazer and doing covers of Britney Spears songs... I can't remember how I got there, but my teacher said he'd have to fail me because it had mild nudity.

Drag culture has always been about excess.

Zumbao' is a word that is not commonly used in mainstream America or even mainstream Latino America. For me, I needed a word that describes me as a performer, as an artist and that is just me wilding out and being crazy. I'm Zumbao.