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.
And if I would have taken lessons I probably wouldn't have done it, and what forced me to do all this weird stuff on the guitar was I couldn't afford effects pedals, I didn't have all this stuff when I was a kid so I just tried to squeeze all the weird noises I could out of the guitar, which brings me to building guitars.
I'm not in any rush. I'm not somebody who, if I write a song, I get it out. That's not something I've ever really quite done.
Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.
And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.
I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
You may not, cannot, appropriate beauty. It is the wealth of the eye, and a cat may gaze upon a king.
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