Sonja Sohn Quotes

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.

I wish to continue to essay roles that will help me find my place in the audience's hearts.

It's such a rare and rewarding thing to be in control of space and time for two hours a night, to go through a journey and take the audience along. There's nothing quite like it.

Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

I try to give each performance my own soul, to bring a truth to my character. Hopefully, when I bring that much truth to a character, it resonates with somebody, and it sparks some kind of emotion in them.

Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.

The reason I'm an actor and am trying to make my way in drama is to move people, to affect people, to gain a response - so these people who come up to you in the street are your audience.

I just love doing radio. I've learned to be more vulnerable through radio than even I've been through books and writing lyrics. It's a different type of experience where, if I'm writing a lyric, I can sort of hide behind it a little bit.

Actors have to make you believe that it's happening for the first time and all that jazz and make it human and at the same time entertain you.

First and foremost, I'm an oral storyteller - I'll make a poetic choice over a grammatical choice every single time.

For many years, there has been only one place where I am in touch with my emotions fearlessly, and that's the stage. Being on stage fills my soul in many ways, almost completely. It's my vice.

For me writing and acting all comes out of the same place, a compulsion to review and connect to something. For me they are more similar than different.

You can keep yourself alive. That's the magic of being an actor.

Listen, acting is not surgery, it's entertainment. You're doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we're vulnerable is that we're always trying to recreate human behaviour.

Acting is a nice childish profession - pretending you're someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

Don't forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: 'Well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain't coming across to me?' It is to be shared.

I was a very good girl for a long time, that's what really drew me to acting. The stage was the perfect place to be outrageous, to be sad, to be angry, to be all these different things.

As an actor, every opportunity, every role, everything that I do is an opportunity to have someone have a human experience with my work. I don't just want it to be about a cute wardrobe and a high paycheck.

Acting is a privilege, and I'm exceedingly blessed to be able to do what I do. At the end of the day, it's all entertainment.

Musicals allow a depth of emotion that you don't get in another form of acting, the chord changes, the lyrics really affect people, so that in two hours, you've forgotten about things.

Within a safe environment, the theater, you can have a big ride, big ups and downs, intensity, warmth, humanity, laughs, tears - you want that full range of emotion.

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

It's all you want as an actor: to have a story people want to be told.

I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.

I'm an entertainer: I want to make people laugh, cry. I want to move them.