Sur l’échec et le risque :
“Nous avons fait une erreur ? C’est bien. Nous venons d’apprendre quelque chose.”
– Keith Johnstone
“Vous ne pouvez pas réussir chaque atelier en tant qu’enseignant et vous ne pouvez pas ‘gagner’ chaque public en tant que comédien.”
– Keith Johnstone
“Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”
– Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back
“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
– Samuel Beckett
“Failure presents opportunities to create subsequent victories.”
– Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate
“I don’t think about what I do. I do it. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.”
– Ray Bradbury
“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure—or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that’s where you will find success.”
– Thomas J. Watson
Sur la créativité :
“Creativity is not the clever rearranging of the known.”
– Viola Spolin
Sur le théâtre :
“Quelqu’un traverse un espace vide pendant que l’autre observe, c’est suffisant pour que l’acte théâtral soit amorcé.”
– Peter Brook
“L’avenir du théâtre appartient à ceux qui n’y vont pas.”
– Gabriel Garran
“Le théâtre est un art, dont toute l’ambition semble se limiter à être le laboratoire des conditions humaines.”
– Antoine Vitez
“Je tiens ce monde pour ce qu’il est : un théâtre où chacun doit jouer son rôle.”
– William Shakespeare
“Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.”
– George Bernard Shaw
“Speak up, speak clearly, open yourself out, relax your body, find a simple objective. Practice in these goals is practice in respect for the audience, and without respect for the audience, there is no respect for the theater; there is only self-absorption.”
– David Mamet
“Le théâtre est l’art politique par excellence ; nulle part ailleurs la sphère politique de la vie humaine n’est transposée en art. De même, c’est le seul art qui ait pour unique sujet l’homme dans ses relations avec autrui.”
– Hannah Arendt
“Lorsque le travail devient méthode, c’est la mort du théâtre, de la vie. C’est le théâtre bourgeois.”
– Pippo Delbono
Sur la peur :
“Nous n’avons rien à craindre si ce n’est la peur elle-même.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
“There’s only one way to get through the fog of fear, and that’s to transform it into the clarity of exhilaration. One of the greatest pieces of wisdom I’ve ever heard comes from Fritz Perls, MD, the psychiatrist and founder of Gestalt therapy. He said, ‘Fear is excitement without the breath.’ Here’s what this intriguing statement means: the very same mechanisms that produce excitement also produce fear, and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it. On the other hand, excitement turns into fear quickly if you hold your breath.”
– Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap
“If one listened to all the dire warnings of danger just around the corner, one would never leave the dock.”
– Miles Smeeton, circumnavigator / author
Sur le feedback :
“Le rire est trompeur !”
– Keith Johnstone
“Il faut l’audace et l’opiniâtreté d’imposer au public ce qu’il ne sait pas qu’il désire.”
– Jean Vilar
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.”
– Anonymous
Sur le divertissement :
“It’s not easy to kill the curiosity of an ape, but sitting it at a desk for year after year of organized boredom might do the trick. Our preoccupation with trivia suggests that the urge to learn is intact, but that learning anything of significance has become stressful. The Executive producer of the David Letterman show, Robert Morton, said, ‘If you walk away from this show learning something, then we haven’t done our job’. If entertainment is designed to pass the time without teaching us anything, then I have to presume that it’s a spin-off of our education system. Other cultures have feasts, celebrations and morality plays, and they may tear out hearts to ensure that the sun comes up, but I think that entertainment is peculiar to us, and many of us are entertained for most of our waking hours.”
– Keith Johnstone
Sur le jeu :
“Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans. It is lovely to be silly at the right moment.”
– Horace
“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”
– Heraclitus
“It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
– D.W. Winnicott, British pediatrician
“Play touches and stimulates vitality, awakening the whole person – mind, body, intelligence and creativity.”
– Viola Spolin
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
– Albert Einstein
Sur l’éducation :
“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
– Isaac Asimov
“”Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”
– Bertrand Russell
Sur la pédagogie :
“Vous ne parviendrez jamais à faire des sages si vous ne faites d’abord des polissons.”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Sur l’écriture et la dramaturgie :
“Drama is not conflict. Drama is agreement, exploration, and anything that opens up possibilities.”
– Joyce Piven, 12/11/2012
“When you raise the stakes, you heighten the attraction.”
– The Thomas Crown Affair
Sur l’improvisation (théâtrale) :
“Si vous savez le faire (improviser ou enseigner), ça veut dire que vous avez codifié votre boite à outil !”
– Keith Johnstone
“Si le processus est bon, je présume que le produit fini sera bon. Cela m’empêche de croire qu’une scène improvisée est de ‘qualité’ si elle ressemble à une scène écrite (comme si l’improvisation n’était qu’une étape sur le chemin du théâtre conventionnel).”
– Keith Johnstone
“I don’t even think you should tell the audience you’re improvising. It’s like an apology in case it’s bad : ‘we’re just making it up’… If the improv isn’t better than the rehearsed stuff, then you should just rehearse it.”
– Keith Johnstone
“In improv, you are not in the results business. When you are truly improvising, you never know where you going to end up, and life is no different. Actually, in improv if you are doing a scene and you think you know where you are going, you not improvising at all — you are trying to controlling the outcome and you’ll end up with crumbs when you could have had the whole cake. Any time you collaborate with someone, you will create something beyond what you could have imagined by yourself. I can not tell you how many great opportunities have happened in my life because I showed for one thing, didn’t worry about the results, and ended up getting something even bigger.”
– Jimmy Carrane
“L’improvisation est la mère de l’art dramatique. Elle est à l’origine de tous les théâtres, de tous les contes, de tous les récits, de l’acte même de jouer, d’interpréter. Même lorsqu’on joue un texte actuel ou du répertoire, l’acteur improvise. Ce n’est plus la mémoire qui s’exprime mais le moment présent, bien sûr dans ce cas, répété jusqu’à l’oubli.”
– Raymond Cloutier
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