If you see the sunset, does it have to mean something? If you hear the birds singing does it have to have a message?
Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated.
I think by drawing, so I'll draw or diagram everything from a piece of furniture to a stage gesture. I understand things best when they're in graphics, not words.
The mind is a muscle.
I grew up in a town where there were no galleries, no museums, no theaters - a very religious, ultraconservative community.
I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.
I try to present something that is full of time. Not timeless, but full of time. I never like a work where we try to update it, but it's still not interesting to see a work that is dated. If one is successful, then a work can be full of time. And time is very complex.
When we look back at the Mayans or ancient Egypt, we look at their art.
If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before.
Yes, I've been in love, but I guess I'm too involved with myself and my work. I think I'm in love with my work, and I'm in love with the people I work with.
We're so afraid to lose the audience. Let the audience go.
My method is much like choreography. I don't sit at a table. I work in a room with people.
I did a masterclass at the Juilliard and asked the students, 'Can you stand?' 'Sure.' 'Can you walk?' 'Sure.' They couldn't. They had never really thought about it.
I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.
If you take a Baroque commode and put a Baroque clock on top of it, maybe it is not so interesting as when you put a computer on top of it. Then you see both items in a new way.
I never studied theatre; I learned it by doing it. If I had studied theatre, I would not be making the kind of theatre I am making.
I don't see much difference between living and working. I think living is a part of my work. People often say, 'How can you work so much?' I don't think about it as work. I think of it as a way to live.
The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.'
When works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity.
What interested me was dance - the way that it was constructed with time-space constructions, and that it was abstract. I always thought: 'Why couldn't theater be that way? Or an opera?'
