It took me two years to walk around a chair with ease; it took me another two years to learn how to laugh onstage - and I had to learn everything.
Laurence OlivierRead
Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.
Interpretation
Acting is a form of art that involves creating illusions rather than portraying reality.
Laurence Olivier's quote reflects on the nature of acting, suggesting that it is not necessarily about being authentic or true to life but rather about creating a believable illusion for an audience. Just like magic, acting relies on the skill of the performer to craft an experience that captivates and engages viewers, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.
In practice
This quote can be used to inspire actors during a workshop on performance techniques.
It took me two years to walk around a chair with ease; it took me another two years to learn how to laugh onstage - and I had to learn everything.
What is the main problem of the actor? It is to keep the audience awake, and not let them go to sleep, then wake up and go home feeling they've wasted their money.
Work is life for me, it is the only point of life - and with it there is almost religious belief that service is everything.
I don't know what is better than the work that is given to the actor - to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself.
Acting is an everlasting search for truth.
I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.
I want to allow others to reveal and celebrate aspects of themselves that are usually hidden. My camera is a witness. It holds a light up for my subjects to help them feel their own essence, and gives them the courage to collaborate in the recording of these revelations.
Say it, no ideas but in things - nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident - split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained - secret - into the body of the light!
Designing is not a profession but an attitude. Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is the intergration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. Thinking in relationships.
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
Being on stage is magic. There's nothing like it. You feel the energy of everybody who's out there. You feel it all over your body. When the lights hit you, it's all over, I swear it is.
I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
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