Quotes About Audience

Kids audience is a brilliant audience. If you've got an audience of adults standing up and clapping, or you've got an audience of kids standing up and clapping, I know which one I'd choose.

The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience, there is no theater. Everything done is ultimately for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, fellow players, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.

I don't understand choreographers who say they don't care about the audience or that they would be happy to present their works non-publicly. I think dance is a form of communication and the goal is to dialogue with the audience. If an audience member tells me they cried or that the dance moved them to think about their own journey or a family member's, then the work is successful.

Undeniably, the audience for improvisation, good or bad, active or passive, sympathetic or hostile, has a power that no other audience has. It can affect the creation of that which is being witnessed. And perhaps because of that possibility the audience for improvisation has a degree of intimacy with the music that is not achieved in any other situation.

I see the audience as the final collaborator. I think it's kind of bullshit when people say, "I'm not interested in the audience reaction." I'm like, "Then why do you do theater? You can write a book, then you don't have to see how the audience reacts." It's a living, breathing thing.

I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen's fairs, policemen's balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I'd seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.

I think it's important for me, for my crew and for the audience to bring something new to each show. I have friends who have done the same act, word for word for word, for 20 years. I have a problem with that. I think the audience should see something new in each show.

Don't let a single comic moment pass you by; then help the audience get the laughs. Give them permission to laugh by holding for laughter and by letting them know early on what they're in for. In the first few moments, the audience is gathering information, looking at the scenery and costumes. Create a comic moment as soon as you can.

The choreographer and the dancer must remember
that they reach the audience through the eye.
It's the illusion created which convinces the audience,
much as it is with the work of a magician.

When I give talks like the one I'm going to give at the Changing Advertising Summit, one of the points I often make to the audience is that I'm not one of those speakers who stands in front of the audience and pontificates - everything I talk about I'm actually doing myself. I'm living it.

I have a children's theater background, so I grew up performing for child audiences; it's sort of my specialty. I know the child audience pretty well - or felt like I did because I performed for them so much. I studied a lot about the child audience, about theater. So it was naturally a place that I gravitated to.

I felt that, as time went on, an audience gets to know you and in a weird way, you kind of feel like you get to know the audience a little bit. When I'm doing stand-up gigs now, I feel like I'm doing gigs in front of people I know. I think that's the result of doing late-night shows for so long.

In comedy, beware the split focus. The audience should focus on the face of the actor. The audience must see the setup. If there is action elsewhere on the stage, the comic line can be lost.

My show is an anti-show and the audience have to want to listen. I'm sitting down, there's only one of me, I don't talk much to the audience and it is very quiet. I wouldn't be able to do that kind of show if people didn't know me and my material.

Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?

As a director, there is nothing more fun than seeing an audience screaming and jumping. You are the ultimate puppet master, controlling the emotions of the audience.

When I was a kid in Eugene, Oregon, there was this fantastic guitar player who went out on the tables, chairs, out in the audience and played. So I started taking my guitar in the audience. I tripped, fell backwards and ripped my pants.

If you're up there performing a song for the first time, it's as if you're hearing it through their ears. You become acutely self-conscious of the song in performance, so that's a good thing before recording. But I like to have some surprises for the audience; I don't want the audience to know everything that's going to be on the record, because these days, with the Internet, people become avid collectors of pre-knowledge.

When I look out at the audience at some of our shows, I think we are reaching a younger audience... I see lots of people in their 30s and 40s, but I also see a lot of people in their young and middle teens, and thats definitely reassuring.

A lot of people that I know are bugged with the idea that they have got to have an audience, or they have got to be liked. I think the more that you fall into that trap it makes your own life harder to come to terms with, because an audience appreciation is only going to be periodic at the best of times.

I like the saying: "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same - the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds - every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with.

I think ultimately if you have a very high expectation of your audience and you know exactly what it is you're trying to express through the medium of film, there will always be an audience for you.

There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?

I love watching audiences scream. I imagine it's the same joy that a director feels who has made a comedy when he or she is sitting at the back of a theater listening to the audience laugh. That sound of laughter is so sweet to a comedy director and that's exactly how a horror film feels when you hear the audience scream.

I never like to play for myself, and that is why I don't own a grand piano. To play for yourself is like looking at yourself in a mirror. I like to practice; that is to work at a task. But to play there must be an audience. New things happen when you play for an audience. You don't know what will occur. You make discoveries with the music, and it is always the first time. It is an exchange, a communion.

I seek a diverse spectrum of roles. If I just was in a large-budget feature for a younger audience, then I want to find a smaller, more character-driven piece that might be for a more mature audience. Or if I'm playing a goofier character, then maybe I want to go play a serious, psychopathic character. But at the same time, it's usually a case-by-case basis where I'm judging the merit of a role by the script I'm given, and it usually has less to do with the larger framework and more to do with how the part personally appeals to me in that moment.

To achieve the intimacy between performer and audience in storytelling, I feel like I have to let the audience in on my emotional state, not just, "Here's a story I'm going to tell by rote, and you're just going to listen to it, because I'm such a wonderfully entertaining fellow." It's the idea of sharing enough of myself that it's not just all about, "Look at me, look at me." There's an element to it of, "You understand what I'm talking about, right? You've been in this place that I've been in," which makes it a richer experience.

I've had shows where you think, "Is this going well? I can't tell," and then you say goodnight and you get this ovation. They're sorta like a theater audience. I've learned that much; that they're not always going to be doing backflips - but I'll never figure it out. Because sometimes you walk up there, and they're so excited, and then other times, it's just... But sometimes an audience is bad, and you can tell them they're bad, and that sort of breaks the ice a bit.

Being in front of the audience, letting my audience see me in person - it is real intimate, you get to make them laugh and cry, they get to feel you. And then afterward, we go out and do a meet-and-greet session with the fans. It was just a wonderful experience. I really, really enjoyed it.

The internet has created a transnational audience. If you publish something in the New York Times, it's read all over the world. Who knows how big this audience is or how long it will last.

Every week for me was the same audience, and every week they heckled me. The better I got at comedy, the better the audience was at heckling me. But it helped me with my joke writing.

Smart brands never try to appeal to more than their audience group. Assuming you're audience is one of the segments that watches, it's your chance to galvanize this specific group, which is larger here than anywhere else, with a bold new idea that can re-magnetize the human/brand connection for a new year.

The commercial theatre may still be considered one of New York's primary tourist attractions, but . . . there is no longer an audience for serious Broadway plays. . . . Perhaps we should acknowledge that, having lost its traditional audience, Broadway can never again be a home for new plays.

But I always communicate with the audience. I never pretend like I'm just in my bedroom making a track. The whole point of doing a gig is, like, a feedback thing between you and the audience.

We're all so jaded. We've seen so many movies. We know what's going to happen in every single movie. I mean, there are some movies where I'm like why do I even need to keep watching? And so, if you can make a movie in which you're completely surprising the audience left and right, and left and right, then you've won. If a jaded film critic or reporter or an audience is like, "I didn't see that one coming," that to me is like a victory.

The thing with playing live is, most of the audience is in their 20s and 30s. If you're older than that, you don't tend to go out to shows anymore. So it's good if you can attract a younger audience because they've got the energy to get up off the sofa and go out.

The audience wants to be attracted not by the critics, but by a great story. You must deliver to the audience emotion - and when I say emotion, I mean suspense, drama, love.

The inner life of the [imagination], and not the personal and tiny experiential resources of the actor, should be elaborated on the stage and shown to the audience. This life is rich and revealing for the audience as well as for the actor himself.

The size of your audience doesn't matter. What's important is that your audience is listening.

At the end of the day, I really go with my personal taste and with what's on the page in terms of character. But beyond that, there's a complexity about the scripts I tend to respond to. I've not lost my curiosity about how the world functions. And a script that can embody that and thematically explore bigger questions in a way which seems fresh is likely to get my attention. Frankly, I also have an eye for what will appeal to an audience, as opposed to a self-indulgent exercise that isn't taking the audience into account.

You're your first best audience, long before anybody else hears you. So don't be an easy audience. Keep asking for more.

I can go in front of an orchestra. I can go in front of an audience. But if you see me walking through an audience in the reception or through a lot of people, I'm still shy.

The most stressful and difficult part of steering a large movie is that you are taking on the responsibility of communicating with a very wide audience. You can't ever hide behind the notion of, 'Okay, they just don't get it,' or, 'Certain people just don't get it.' You have to be mindful of the size of your audience, and you have to communicate in a way that lets them in.

Even in the tragedies, Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools. He puts in certain middle-range characters. And when you go to the Globe, you realize how that all works. The people who paid more sat in seats around the edge. Everybody else paid a penny. They put it into a tin box - that's why we call it the "box office." They stood in the pit, but they were very close, so when Hamlet was doing his soliloquy, it was addressed to you, the audience - right there.

Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience.

When you're doing stand-up, you achieve an intimacy with the audience you can't get on TV. There's not a better feeling in the entire world then when you look out and see the audience is identifying with you.

At any given time, on our band Drive-by Truckers' shows there might be someone who's eight years old or 80 years old in the audience. Some nights there are a lot of girls in the audience, some nights not. It's so unpredictable, but I like that. A lot of Republicans come see us. I've got many friends and family that are Republicans, so our following definitely cuts across the political lines and all of that. Which puts us in the unique position of not just preaching to the converted. I respect and value that.

I'd like to give the audience what they've always wanted to see and also I want to give the audience what they've never seen. It's these two things I'm striving for.