The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience, there is no theater. Everything done is ultimately for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, fellow players, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of the audience in the theater experience.
Viola Spolin highlights that the audience holds a central role in theater, as their enjoyment and presence validate the performance. The relationship between performers and the audience transforms the act of theater into a meaningful exchange, underscoring that without the audience, the performance loses its purpose and significance.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of art, this quote serves to remind listeners of the audience's role.
When student-actors see people and the way they behave when together, see the color of the sky, hear the sounds in the air, feel the ground beneath them and the wind on their faces, they get a wider view of their personal world and development in the theater is quickened. The world provides the material for the theater and artistic growth develops hand-in-hand with one's recognition of it and one's self within it.
The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.
The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency - half tiger, half poet.
I can't read novels while I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in.
The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.
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