I did a lot of touring in my youth, and I learnt very quickly that giving is what it's all about. It's about the gift of making an audience feel great and forget their cares, if only for a few hours.
Interpretation
Giving to others and creating joy is the essence of performance.
This quote highlights the importance of generosity and the act of giving in artistic expression, particularly in performance. Julie Andrews emphasizes that the true value of performing lies in the ability to uplift an audience, allowing them to escape their worries and experience happiness, even if just momentarily.
In practice
This quote can be used to inspire a group of artists at a workshop about the importance of audience engagement.
I've learned a lot of things about myself through singing. I used to have a certain dislike of the audience, not as individual people, but as a giant body who was judging me. Of course, it wasn`t really them judging me. It was me judging me. Once I got past that fear, it freed me up, not just when I was performing but in other parts of my life.
Singing has been a cherished gift, and my inability to sing has been a devastating blow.
My mother was terribly important to me, and I know how much I yearned for her in my youth, but I don't think I truly trusted her.
I come from a long line of below-stairs maids and gardeners. Good ol' peasant stock. My mother and her sister made a quantum leap out of that life. Then I made another quantum leap.
Every time I go out to perform, believe me. You never lose that fear of, 'I hope I do it right. I hope I don't fall flat on my face. I hope this will be good for them.'
Success is terrifying. Like happiness, it is often appreciated in retrospect. It's only later that you place it in perspective. Years from now, I'll look back and say, ‘God, wasn't it wonderful.’
I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.
Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk.
As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone—though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning than other men—so the world of Reality exists for all; and all may participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to the strength and purity of their desire.
Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.
The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.
I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette) I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body
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