Dramatic Context Quotes

I work in a dramatic context, meaning we write with a lot of character specifics, a lot of story specifics. There's a lot of architecture in our songs.

You must be so thoroughly immersed in the given circumstances of the play, then you decide what it is at any given moment what that the actor wants.

True expression is hard when performing opera. The problem is that opera relies on the dramatic context of the piece. It can be interpreted and represented, but there are guidelines; there is a vocabulary within the pieces that you must know objectively and reflect.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

My father used to say it was just there, the opportunity. It was all teed up for him. The talkies were starting, and here was Hollywood waiting for people to come from New York who had the training, who could do music with a sense of dramatic context.

Being comedic is a skill, because there is a fine line where the context is important. And being dramatic is just being honest and real in that moment.

With Shakespeare, the hard work is to find out why he said it and how it can relate to the audience.

An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for astrict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.

I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I'm an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve an audience. That's what I want to do.

If you're going to walk into a scene on a stage, you've gotta know what room you just left and what just happened.

I love trying to give some flesh to rather naked bones sometimes. I've always felt it my duty and to try and bring on the character's off-stage life, what happened that is not revealed.

Characters begin as voices, then gain presence by being viewed in others' eyes. Characters define one another in dramatic contexts. It is often very exciting, when characters meet - out of their encounters, unanticipated stories can spring.

I need to know who the audience are in any particular play. It's no good forgetting that they're there.

I always just read the play and find a world. That world must honour the play, enhance it, and maybe shine some new light - not satirise or try to reinvent in a way that is placing the idea above the thing. The play is the thing.

Performing is just standing up there and doing something. Performance takes on an edge to it. It has a more dramatic context.

I was an actor for over a year before I ever saw a play.

Because I was writing verse, my instructor suggested I study Shakespeare. The Shakespeare teacher insisted you couldn't understand the text without seeing it on its feet.

There may be lots of questions that anybody - an actor or a director or anybody - can ask about a character in a play of mine that are not answered in the play, but if it's a question that I don't think is relevant, I don't bother about it. There's no reason to ask it.

I think some people watch 'Raging Bull,' or they watch 'The Piano Teacher,' and I think they're more, maybe, able to process an antihero in a dramatic context, where people more want comedy to take care of them. But that's not really taking care of people. That's just providing escape, which sometimes is necessary.