Gord Downie Quotes

Music is my life. I love doing it, so I just do it nonstop all day. And with dancing, I wanted to put on a show for people. I don't want to just be sitting there doing nothing, so that's when I started to dance.

I prefer to think of the audience as a single living organism with which I am sharing a singular, never-to-be-repeated experience.

It's been a continuity right from the beginning - that longing to weave together perceptions, to affirm the richness of us as human beings both as performers and audience members.

One of the things I love about theater, one of the reasons I'll never give it up, is that it's fifty percent the audience's responsibility.

Whether you are a writer or an actor or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That's what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that with an audience in a specific compact: the play is unfinished unless it has an audience, and they are as important as everyone else.

I have to feel the audience. I enjoy that feeling of community. There's something sort of spiritual about it in a lot of ways. It's like we're all doing this together.

'River of Light,' to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance.

As an actor to watch an audience of people howl together in a single mind as a result of work you've done together with friends is a privilege.

When an audience comes to one of my concerts, I hope they'll see themselves, somewhere, in one of the songs.

I'm interested in putting something on stage that will have a very wide appeal without being condescending; that will reach an audience and make it part of the dance; that will get everybody in the theater.

Strictly' has evolved - there are such beautiful stories within each dance. We're not doing a ballroom and Latin competition, it's an entertainment show.

The greatest thing in the world as an actor or an artist to connect.

The thing I find really special in performance is that there is this slightly mystical thing that takes over when you're responding to a crowd and engaging in people's imaginations collectively in a room. I've always thought that one of the most incredible things about being alive is going to see some kind of performance like that.

I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.

The way theater can bring people together is so powerful.

The truth is, when you want a great show, it's not 'entertaining' the audience - it's you sharing with them... an experience of communion.

Art is not created in a vacuum. That experience is something to be shared with a group of people, and to be moved in that way.

As a performer, the thing that I love is to see people come together.

The thing I love about theater is the fact that everyone's complicit. We're either there as a storyteller, or we're there as a listener, and it's basically a campfire situation.

In some ways, it's more rewarding to hear someone interpret a piece of music that you're a part of.

I discovered that my drag really does speak to people on an emotional level. I also discovered that people are sometimes put off by an intellectual approach to drag.

'Nicholas Nickleby' was the best example, where 43 people could make an audience of 1,500 look at a fingernail at any given moment. It was so controlled, and yet it was a group of disparate individuals. It was a happy, constructive time, and it seemed to be an active discussion of what makes the theater work.

As an actress, my ultimate goal is to create a universal experience in my acting.

I consider each performance to be an intimate conversation between me and the audience members.

Songs bring us into connection with each other. When they resonate, when we're in resonance, singing together, we become one for that 3 1/2 or four minutes the song lasts. It takes away that isolated loneliness that modern life is so full of.