My plays have been performed before children, workers, and peasants, and they have well understood the meaning of my theatre. What is needed for people to watch my theatre is a freshness and openness of mind.
Interpretation
Eugene Ionesco emphasizes the importance of openness and fresh perspectives for audiences to truly understand and appreciate theatre.
In this quote, Eugene Ionesco highlights that his plays resonate with various demographics, including children and workers, indicating that great art is accessible regardless of social status. He asserts that a key requirement for viewers to grasp the essence of his theatre is a willingness to approach it with a fresh and open mind, suggesting that preconceived notions can hinder one's appreciation of art.
In practice
In a discussion about the accessibility of theatre to all audience types.
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.
The willed recovery of what's been lost - often forcibly, I suppose - is what keeps me going. It is this reason I found myself a poet and a collector and now a curator: to save what we didn't even know needed saving.
At the ballet classes I took when I first came to New York, I would see great dancers like Cynthia Gregory and Lupe Serrano. I would look at them and study what they could do, and what I couldn't do. And then I'd think maybe they should try what I could do.
The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
I'm here to make good pictures. If I don't see it, I won't touch it. I may not make a good picture, but I still gotta believe in it!
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.