Performing Artist Quotes

• I think in the end there is one ultimate goal with all my careers, and that is, as a performing artist, you want to explore the deepest, most truthful way to express a point of view, or whatever the character is thinking, or whatever emotion you're trying to convey. I think with the different media it's just about what muscles you use to express that.

  Audra McDonald

  Character, Thinking, Artist

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• [Performing artists] are making greater percentages. People are going to live events more and it's a big success story for everyone - except the music industry itself.

  Russell Simmons

  Artist, People, Events

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• If one had to define one essential gift with which a dancer needs to be endowed, there might be a rush of answers. A beautiful body, grace of line, graciousness of spirit, joy in the work, ability to please, unswerving integrity, relentless ambition towards some abstract perfection. Certainly all these factors determine a dancer's character, and every element exists in some combination within the performing artist's presence.

  Lincoln Kirstein

  Beautiful, Dance, Integrity

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• Believe it or not, most people think of me as a recording artist, but actually the way I think of myself and the way I earn my living is as a performing artist.

  Helen Reddy

  Believe, Artist, Thinking

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• Dancers, like all performing artists, like nothing better than to be challenged.

  Karen Kain

  Artist, Dancer, Performing

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• The main difference between the art of the actor and all other arts is that every other [non-performing] artist may create whenever he is in the mood of inspiration. But the artist of the stage must be the master of his own inspiration, and must know how to call it forth at the hour announced on the posters of the theatre. This is the chief secret of our art.

  Constantin Stanislavski

  Art, Inspiration, Differences

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• San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

  Gavin Newsom

  Art, San Francisco, Long

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• A professional entertainer who allows himself to become known as a singer of folk songs is bound to have trouble with his conscience provided, of course, that he possesses one. As a performing artist, he will pride himself on timing and other techniques designed to keep the audience in his control ... his respect for genuine folklore reminds him that these changes, and these techniques, may give the audience a false picture of folk music.

  Sam Hinton

  Song, Pride, Artist

  "The Singer of Folk Songs and His Conscience". Book by Sam Hinton, Western Folklore 14:3, p. 170 - 173, July 1955.

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• I could draw ideas. I remember writing a paper for a seminar class. I remember writing a paper about - and this is going to sound really sort of pretentious, but that's where my mind was at the time - how acting and the performing artist can really be like a Bodhisattva, how they can communicate ultimately an idea in a way that can move and shift things. And that was wonderful. I didn't know many classes where I could try and relate the thing that I really loved and wanted to do into an intellectual idea, and that happened to be one of them.

  Jake Gyllenhaal

  Moving, Writing, Artist

  "10 Years After 'Brokeback,' Jake Gyllenhaal Remembers Heath Ledger: 'Way Beyond His Years as a Human'". Interview with Stephen Galloway, www.hollywoodreporter.com. November 25, 2015.

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