Spalding Gray Quotes

I always wanted to experience what performance would be like without the fourth wall, so I formed a company in Australia, and we did avant-garde theater, playing with gender norms, conversations about race - we just had a box of issues that we wanted to subvert with our stories, with dance.

We were doing performance art as far back as 1965, just not calling it that.

For me, you say the words 'concept record,' and the first thing I think of is theater or the opera or something.

Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.

Theatre was an art form that I didn't really respect, and because I wanted to shake it up and do different things on stage, I was able to combine all the things I'd learnt through writing on my own.

I enjoy theater just for the sheer excitement of it and the immediate response that you get, and how every night the audience is a little bit different; but then, it's expensive to work in N.Y., and stage work is limited, so you're just doing it for the art.

Theater is dangerously open to repetition. It's exciting when you hit on a new way.

You'd have to go all the way back to 1972 to find a version of me who didn't care about theater, who didn't read Playbill and watch the Tony Awards, or get why Bob Fosse's choreography was so groundbreaking that all you need to say is 'Fosse hands' and theater people know what you mean.

I never thought about movies. I never thought about Hollywood. It was just being on the stage and being in New York.

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 was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher, and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.

I've seen some terrible plays, but I generally enjoy myself. One play I walked out of, I have a tremendous respect for the author. That was Robert Wilson, something called 'Network,' which consisted of Wilson sitting on a bunk, the dialogue of the movie 'Network' looped in while a chair on a rope went up and down.

My mom was an actress in the local Seattle theater doing experimental plays.

Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of 'postmodern theatre'. So I said to my office, 'This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don't know what it means, but... they're paying me a lot of money, so I'll go.'

I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.

Neil and I have always been big fans of drag, emerging theater, and anything that is really 'out there' in terms of performance.

I hardly ever see new plays. They don't have the audacity and daring that they used to.

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.

Compared to other forms of drama, performance art is often thought of as inaccessible and overly artsy. I prefer to think of it as storytelling, something that has been with us through the ages and a part of every culture.

We opened a theater in 2006 called Loft Ensemble in Sherman Oaks. And we write our own plays and do goofy characters and pack a whopping 20 people per night to watch our work.

For me, theater will always be very, very much alive, but not necessarily in the theatrical tradition.

My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.

The Boston run of 'Lolita, My Love' ended after a mere nine performances - though one of them was recorded at decent enough quality to be preserved by the New York Public Library.

I made my performance debut in New York City downtown on the Lower East Side in college doing awkward performance art as a go-go dancer at Lady Starlight's Party. And I never thought that my love for mediocre performance art and bad mime would ever come to use in my career as an actor. But my fantasies came true and I got to play Maureen in Rent.

I am pure performance, and Robert Wilson is pure theater.