Quotes & Sayings About Stage Performers

All performers get on stage because they need to feel love from an audience. I might appear confident, but those three seconds before I get out there, I'm a mess. But I have to take the risk; otherwise, I'd be miserable and would feel like I wasn't seeing through my personal destiny. — Idina Menzel

Most performers take themselves too seriously. They forget there is a difference between the characters they play on the screen or stage and themselves, but the public doesn't forget there is a difference. They see how silly it is if you try to be the same person all the time. — Grace Jones

It was also great to have the Backstreet Boys appear on stage with me because I have gotten to know them all a little bit just recently, and not only are they great performers, but they also very hard working professionals and really nice guys. — Elton John

Individuals are concerned not
with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with
the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that
these standards are being realized. Our activity, then, is
largely concerned with moral matters, but as performers we
do not have a moral concern in these moral matters. As
performers we are merchants of morality. Our day is given
over to intimate contact with the goods we display and our
minds are filled with intimate understandings of them; but it
may well be that the more attention we give to these goods,
th e more d is ta n t we feel from them and from those who are
believing enough to buy them. To use a different imagery,
the very obligation and profitablility of appearing always in
a steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forces
us to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of
the stage. — Erving Goffman

I don't think any responsible performer would go on stage high. If he convinced himself he is better that way, he is deluding himself. — Oliver

The words we use have weight. Whether it's in a conversation with a friend or something said publicly on stage or broadcast. And as performers, we know that because that's why we choose the words we use - that's the whole point of comedy. — Hari Kondabolu

I moved on to the University of California, Berkley, coordinating interpreters for Deaf students at the university. The first year I was at Berkley, we brought in artists, performers, actors, and poets to create a Deaf arts festival. I did a lot of the interpreting for the stage performers. By the second year, I realized that I really liked producing arts festivals that had to do something with signing. — Jack Jason

I grew up, in my childhood, with some of the greatest women performers, on stage and on screen, and even my family - my mother and my sisters. So I was very busy watching women, as a child! I have a lot of memories of great women performers — John Travolta

The Church is enamored with skilled orators and performers working the stage like a choreographed Broadway play. Others profess to talk about how Jesus ministry was mere story telling like through parables and that is why it was so effective. It is though there is some magical incantation, if we just repeat then things will happen. It is like the current modernity movement in the church, dumb it down that is the problem. If we just take away the mystery and otherness of God then we will know and see God, really? — Jonah Books

The stage is close to being in the middle of the hall, so that the performers are surrounded by the listeners. I feel that we are all experiencing the music together. — Emanuel Ax

I've always felt kind of safe on stage, protected. I've talked to other performers about this and they feel the same things, particularly in the live arena. I never get nervous going on stage to do a play. Doing film or television I'll have more butterflies. — Cillian Murphy

In the early days of my carer as an actor, I shared what was then the prevailing attitude of Negro performers :;that the content and form of a play or a film scenario was of little importance to us. What mattered was was the opportunity, which came so seldom to our folks ... Later I came to understand that the Negro artist could not view the matter simply in terms of of his individual interests, and that he had a responsibility to his people who rightfully resented the traditional stereotyped portrayals of Negros on stage and screen. — Paul Robeson

I don't like when performers rag on their ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend in absentia. If they're not there, it just feels rude ... I'm never going to say anything personal about myself on stage. That's my new goal. — David Rees

Church is not for pretenders and performers. Church is a place for pastors to preach principles of the faith in order to prepare believers to face the storms of life on the stage of an unbelieving world. — Billy Graham

Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people. — Stephen Jay Gould

I think that watching artists, soulful artists, they get into it. It's always the way I perform, so when I'm on stage I just try to get into it - I'm in my own world. That's the whole thing about the stage, it's like a sacred place. They're [the audience] watching into the different world, right, so it's like you see performers and they're in the same room, so it's a different vibe. Sometimes it's great, but I try to separate it, you know, I wanna separate it 'cos otherwise I feel naked. It just feels natural. — Justin Nozuka

I've always loved acting, even from when I was a child. But when I got on stage, I realised I couldn't act my way out of a paper bag. I was wild and full of unharnessed energy, but I was around all these seasoned performers like Rita Cullis. It was as if they were all in slow motion. — Claron McFadden

'Center Stage' reached people that, as live performers, we would have never had the opportunity to reach. — Sascha Radetsky

Several performers have told me that they do the following brief lovingkindness meditation if they have stage fright: Standing in front of an audience, before they start acting, playing music, or reciting a poem, they send out wishes for the well-being of everyone in the room. 'When I do that,' one singer told me, 'I no longer have a sense of the audience as a group of hostile people out there waiting to judge me. I feel, okay, here we all are together. — Sharon Salzberg

Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more like characters in a costume pageant. And it's a pageant in which the performers are all handsome as stage actors, with uniforms and dress that are always costume perfect. — David McCullough

When I first went on the stage I was 17 and under the legal age for performers. — Ethel Waters

he argued that the Europeans of the 1800s struggled to understand divine energy in two ways, first through theatrical acts where mesmerists and hypnotists amazed audiences with illusions and parlor tricks. When the audiences confronted inexplicable illusions, the performers on stage suggested that mysterious forces were at work. — Scott Carney

This is the world of pretend. We are artists and we are servants of the stage, and I take both jobs very seriously. As artists, we work as a collective - all for one and one for all. As servants, we work for thos who venture out alone, otherwise known as performers. — Rebecca Stead

I feel like with our shows it always feels weird to be performers on stage and not engaging in audience interaction in some way - that exchange of energy is very much a part of the sound. — Taraka Larson

All the world's indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another's audience outside the gilded cage — Neil Peart

I wouldn't specifically say rock n' roll is dead, but I don't see a lot of charismatic performers in the way of new blood who are edgy and dangerous on stage, like Marilyn Manson, who you never quite know if he's going to make it through his own show. — Tommy Lee

I don't think that many performers necessarily want to see their audience empowered. I think a lot of performers, no different from priests, need the hierarchy. Modern, celebrity-driven entertainment turns the stage into an altar, and so many celebrities refuse to be removed from those altars once they manage to ascend. They will not be taken down - the Goddess is offended ... As a storyteller in the old tradition, you held an important place at the circle. Your position was fluid, not necessarily permanent, but it demanded that you respected the others witnessing your performance as much as they respected you. All storytellers, all troubadours worth their salt knew their myths. — Tori Amos