Top 35 Diane Paulus Quotes
#1. I had to drop a boulder to wake people up about the A.R.T. We've done that, and now we have audiences again who want cutting-edge work, who want to be challenged, but who also won't be falling asleep at the theater.
Diane Paulus
#2. Being a director, whether you're in rehearsal or you're in auditions or you're in a creative meeting, is so much to me about being present in the moment. There's a sense of time stopping.
Diane Paulus
#3. Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It's about tempo and change and pulse, whether you're doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.
Diane Paulus
#4. I knew ART was was going to give me this opportunity to expand my role as a director and finally let me have a seat at the table where I could get involved in these policy discussions and producing discussions and, frankly, the financial discussions.
Diane Paulus
#5. It's freeing to not be caught up in your own personal baggage.
Diane Paulus
#6. As a director, I never feel that I have the answers.
Diane Paulus
#7. Art cannot be looked at as an elite, sacred event anymore. It has to be embraced as an accessible, popular form, which is what I believe theater is at its roots.
Diane Paulus
#8. The mission of the A.R.T. is to expand the boundaries of theater through works of the canon and the new works of tomorrow.
Diane Paulus
#10. I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.
Diane Paulus
#11. The idea of making audiences feel like they matter, that the theatre matters, and that they're a partner in the event - that's what fuels me as a director ... I believe it's actually radical to think about the audience.
Diane Paulus
#12. I had this epiphany that I like the interaction with people. I wanted to make things happen at a grassroots level.
Diane Paulus
#13. At the core of what I'm doing is a belief in the audience, a belief that populism doesn't mean dumbing down theater, but rather giving the audience a voice and a role in experiencing theater.
Diane Paulus
#15. I give so much of myself to my work; I want to be with people who are going to be there with me.
Diane Paulus
#16. My generation of director has no illusions that we are going to be fed and cared for by subsidized theater in America.
Diane Paulus
#17. I listen to music, I read scripts, and I know pretty intuitively if I can unlock it in a way. It's actually very liberating when you understand that not everything is for you.
Diane Paulus
#18. Theatre and opera were always the twin kingdoms that I felt I had to conquer, because they were my parents' favorites.
Diane Paulus
#19. I've gotten to the point that I don't even know what tomorrow brings. When I'm teaching, obviously I'm in town for the class every week.
Diane Paulus
#20. Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.
Diane Paulus
#21. I think in our culture there's been a tendency for people to blame the audience. There is a tendency in our industry to say, 'The audience has left the building. People don't want culture anymore.'
Diane Paulus
#22. I'm always interested in working with people who are good team players - that are selfless that way in their interests and dedication to the project.
Diane Paulus
#23. I'm always interested in looking - historically - at how theater can animate history and how all of that can make us engage with our lives in an enriching way.
Diane Paulus
#24. In Elizabethan England or classical Athens ... theater was at the center of, not culture, but society and politics and religion and civic engagement. Those things have a different audience.
Diane Paulus
#25. Politics, to a degree, is about legislation, administration. You can't be there in the trenches.
Diane Paulus
#26. Creativity and the world of the imagination - the beauty of what we see as a child and the kind of play that we experience as a child - can be a way for us to survive tough times.
Diane Paulus
#27. When you're a freelance director, you are hired to create the art, and it kind of stops there.
Diane Paulus
#28. I think every theater in America wants a younger audience ... and you can't just hope to have a younger audience, you have to program things that audience is going to connect with.
Diane Paulus
#29. I grew up with a beautiful gold harp sitting in our living room. My older sister played it.
Diane Paulus
#30. I want an audience that will come sitting forward in their seats.
Diane Paulus
#31. The musical theater is a glorious and distinctly American innovation in the history of theater.
Diane Paulus
#32. For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it's all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that's the definition of spectacle.
Diane Paulus
#33. We're a depraved civilization. All this technology, all the computer games and the iPhones ... nobody will sit for art anymore. What a dismaying state of humanity.
Diane Paulus
#34. I am always looking for what piece, what artists, what playwrights, what directors, what subject matter is going to catalyze an audience.
Diane Paulus
#35. I think actually what keeps the intensity manageable - it's a little counterintuitive - is that it's changing all the time. Every week is different for me.
Diane Paulus
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