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Quote by George C. Wolfe

“I think musicals are a lowbrow, populist art form. And I don't mean lowbrow in a condescending way at all - they are designed to create delight, wonder, joy, surprise. And what becomes really interesting is when innovative or challenging or smart people take it and use the easy runway that the form allows to take people to another planet, or another place. Or subvert it in some way.”

Quote by George C. Wolfe

Author

George C. Wolfe

George C. Wolfe is an American playwright known for his profound exploration of issues related to race, class, and gender. His works include 'Angels in America' and 'Jitney', which have won multiple awards, including the Tony Award. more

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“I'm watching the show and I'm watching the audience watch the show. Because once you leave the rehearsal room, you have space and you can see it. You can watch them watch it. You can't see your work, really, until you're in the theater. You have no perspective. That's not part of my job, to go, "Oh my God, they're so brilliant." I'm not required to swoon.”

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“Any time there is a cultural breakthrough in which this culture transcends what it's supposed to be, there's a violent reaction. So we had a black president, and it's followed by an incredibly violent reaction. It happens over and over.”

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“A friend of mine said that when Barack Obama was running for president, there was a whole generation of white kids who are used to looking up to a black person center stage speaking. And that's because of hip-hop. So there was no adjustment. A person of color in authority at times is very startling to people. But as time goes on, it becomes less startling.”

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“Whenever we think of the body as a vessel for artistic ideas, we somehow always focus on the surface of the body. But the truth is that there is no surface of the body independent of its interior. It's obvious that the outside of the body is always connected to the inside, to thought processes and to an internal anatomy.”

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“Much of the art of the 1960s, from body art to video and direct performance, was concerned with similar issues. And then there was media art, which made it possible to express things directly, without having to rely on the written word, which was manipulated by men.”

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“The female body has always been a construction. Even feminist art of the 1970s fashioned a body in accordance with its own ideas, and in this regard it was a form of manipulation too. Subsequently, we've had to engage with a lot of things that we used to disavow as manipulation. We can't just dismiss everything as manipulations anymore, since the alternatives are constructions, too. From our perspective, from this corner of the planet, we have to admit that it's all constructed. There is absolutely no nature. Nature is one of the biggest constructions.”

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“My interest in time emerged out of an engagement with the media that I was working with. Film and performance are temporal media. They rely on time. When I'm carrying out a performance, it matters, for example, how long I hold one particular gesture or posture. Seriality is very important too. Performance can be used to dilate time or to repeat time. And video, in turn, has its own time.”

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“I was trying to develop a completely new, nonvoyeuristic approach to the female body as something other than a visual object. I wanted to find out what happened when you leave behind the voyeuristic mode and confront people with reality. But that's what was so interesting for me to discover: People don't want to see reality. It's a pretty simple idea, really, this question of how we deal with reality. When something is constructed, when it's projected onto a screen, it's acceptable, but it's different when it's there in front of you in a public space.”

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“I can certainly see a band like Nirvana, like when they started having to play to the kind of guys that beat them up in high school - that was probably shocking. But you make music to move people and you don't get to pick who you move. You just don't. It's exclusionary and elitist and I just never felt that way about music, of all things. The great unifier.”

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“I think when you're young and you get together with a group of guys who think like you and you start to make something that moves you as a group of people and you have a common goal, that's an exciting time. The more years you put behind you, hopefully making music that surpasses what you did before, you're playing bigger places and it kind of weirdly becomes a business. In my opinion young bands have a shelf life and it ranges in time.”

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