James Baldwin on the alchemy of live performance

James Baldwin by Beauford Delaney (1945)

In the theater, a current flowed back and forth between the audience and the actors: flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood — as we say, testifying.

--James Baldwin on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, from The Devil Finds Work (1976)

What would Yoko do?

Think of all your movements in life as dance movements. Breathe. Watch. Listen. Touch. And move between the earth and the sky.

--Yoko Ono (on Facebook)

Aileen Passloff: Dancing, the deepest speaking

It’s essential that people have something in their heads besides dancing. When you dance, you have your history behind you—where you’ve come from, who your friends are, where you ate dinner last night, your dreams. All that is part of the person who is dancing. I am frightened by looking at a dancer in whom there is only dancing going on.

I have known from when I was quite tiny, long before I ever trained at all, that dancing was a powerful speaking from inside oneself, and that it mattered and changed things. Dancing is the deepest kind of speaking we can do.

Aileen Passloff, from "Teacher's Wisdom: Aileen Passloff" 

by Michael Bloom (Dance Magazine: December 2010)

Nora Ephron, 71

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss. ― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. ― Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron, Essayist, Screenwriter and Director, Dies at 71
by Charles McGrath, The New York Times, June 26, 2012

Yoko, so true!

@yokoono tweeted: "Dance is a bodily mantra. It was once the way people reached godliness. And we still do.”

Sondheim on what makes a good critic

For me, a good critic is a good writer. A good critic is someone who recognises and acknowledges the artist's intentions and the work's aspirations, and judges the work by them, not by what his own objectives would have been. A good critic is so impassioned about his subject that he can persuade you to attend something you'd never have imagined going to. A good critic is an entertaining read. A good critic is hard to find.

--  Stephen Sondheim, from Look, I Made a Hat (Virgin Books, 2011)

And see:

Stephen Sondheim: who needs critics?
Good reviews can be as harmful as bad ones, says Stephen Sondheim. In an extract from his new book, he reflects on a life of prizes, putdowns – and the joy of songs sung in Sanskrit
The Guardian, November 20, 2011