Heather Headley Quotes

It's such a joy to work with different ensembles and create a collaboration. Rehearsing and building a performance is very interesting for me.

The hardest thing about a musical is making sure everybody is working on the same damn show. That is the monster.

Music - opera particularly - is a process which is endurable or successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.

I love working with talented young performers.

Songwriting is a give-and-take process, and it can lead to some good, healthy debates.

That said, everything's important, and every musician who plays on the record is an integral part of it.

For me making music is part social, part interaction, part collaboration.

When I put something into motion, the creativity starts to make other people want to jump in, and then a lot of people get employed. I'm just like a shark, in that way. If I stop swimming, I'll die. But, it really is about that shared experience with people. I'm from theater, and that's really what theater feels like.

I did a 20-minute selection of scenes from the play 'Spring Awakening' in college, well before the musical came around, so when the musical was becoming a hot thing, and I was reading interviews with Duncan Sheik about how he came to do the music, I think it's interesting.

Every actor you work with has a different method, same with the director. You have to figure out what your shared language is and how to best support each other, and also take care of yourself.

There's no better feeling than just going in and just working with someone and what comes out is something that the world knows about.

I think it's the essence of any film and any stage production - any work where you do work with other people - of course collaboration is hugely important. One does, for awhile, become family.

From an animation perspective, it doesn't get better than Pixar. You're working so much in the blind because the huge circle of collaborators that's required to pull off a film like this means that you are just one small arc in that large circle. The level of trust that you have to give into is significant.

The one thing I have always felt about musical theatre is that it is, to an extraordinary degree, about construction.

It's great being an actor and being part of a play or a film where there's usually quite a big group of people who are collaborating, and your job is really to fit in and share that energy. With music, because I write the songs, it's a broader, more abstract process.

I love collaborating because I come from the world of being in bands.

You don't realize how beautiful an idea is until you do it with other people. There's this really shimmery, awesome thing when you start finishing a song - where the song just starts writing itself.

It's highly collaborative, musical theater, so everybody has got to somehow get along.

At the end of the day, every decision I make about my music is about creating a collective.

On Broadway, you are working with some incredible people, and they have great reasons for doing things the way they do.

A film takes a lot of time, and yet not enough to share with the people you're making the movie with, I think.

I like the feeling of not knowing where to look when you are only performing for one person or watching someone practice. It creates this kind of a strange in-between, which can be mirrored in the feeling of making a painting.

Also, painting and animation are really solitary pursuits, so the collaborative aspects of music making and acting are pretty welcome sometimes.

The relationship with the cast has everything to do with how a performance develops, and in a sense that while you're discovering a play in the course of rehearsal with the director, you're also discovering it with your fellow actors. We're all in it together.

I never found a professional environment that made the production of plays efficient. Teamwork is demanded, but there are very few teams.