Anne Bogart > Quotes

“You cannot create results. You can only create conditions in which something might happen.”
― Anne Bogart

“Artists and scientists are activists. They look at the world as changeable and they look upon themselves as instruments for change. They understand that the slice of world they occupy is only a fragment but that the fragment is intrinsically connected to the whole. They know that action matters.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“Most of the truly remarkable experiences I've had in theatre have filled me with uncertainty and disorientation”
― Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares

“I write myself into existence by the stories that I tell about my life. I also write with my posture and with my manner of walking and speaking, and I write with words and with my actions.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“We are debris arrangers. Equipped with what we have inherited, we try to make a life, make a living and make art. We are assemblers. We forge received parts into meaningful compositions. This state of affairs is our plight and our destiny, but it also offers the opportunity to find meaning as well as to find communion with others.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“The art experience and the theater experience, gyms for the soul, generate heat and exercise the imagination, empathy, creative thinking, patience and tolerance. A gym for the soul is a place where personal investment is required and the return is real.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“My job is to transcend my own agenda in order to see the wider context and my job is to cultivate the kind of spaciousness where permission is possible. I try to create the room in which everyone is both participating and responsible.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. (Richard Rorty, philosopher)”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“Every creative act involves a leap into the void. The leap has to occur at the right moment and yet the time for the leap is never prescribed. In the midst of a leap, there are no guarantees. To leap can often cause acute embarrassment. Embarrassment is a partner in the creative act—a key collaborator.”
― Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares

“But innovation and invention do not only happen with smart people who have all of the answers. Innovation results from trial and error. The task is to make good mistakes, good errors, in the right direction.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“If what Picasso proposed is true, that the first stroke on the canvas is always a mistake, it is best to get on with the mistake, without delay, earlier rather than later. Write one sentence, make one choice or point at something and say “Yes.” And then, as the process unfolds, and as long as I keep at it and stay attentive and resolute, making adjustments to each mistake, things eventually fall into place.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“In the theater, the attitude of righteous ownership deprives the audience of an encounter with the unfamiliar.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“And it is this search for meaning that keeps us from living in fear. The key to a healthy life is not to be alone, to breathe the same air with others, to share the sensation of living through moments together.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“Limits are a necessary partner in the creative act as well as in the crafting of a successful life. What matters is the ability to look around and accurately recognize what is working for you and what is working against you, adjusting to the realities of the situation and mining the potential of the limits with invention and energy.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“Speaking a story can be an act of letting in light.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“Deep practice is slow, demanding and uncomfortable. To practice deeply is to live deliberately in a space that is uncomfortable but with the encouraging sense that progress can happen.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“she made it clear that artists and audiences need to find the inner capacity to meet an event with spaciousness and a sense of possibility. Both life and art can prepare us for the openness that we need to bring ourselves to the unfolding moment.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“proposed an antidote to the deadening impact of capitalist spectacle in what he named “constructed situations,” which calls on artists to create moments that coax people out of passivity, rendering them the co-creators of what promises to be, according to Debord, a less mediocre life.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“Let’s assume that we have a set number of days to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers. (Jonathan Safran Foer, novelist)”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“Innovation is made possible by the width and breadth of a person’s rummaging around the world, in traffic with the living and the dead. It is by transgressing the boundaries that separate us that we begin to find solutions to the world’s present complexities because inclusion and incorporation of “the other” creates the conditions for innovation.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling

“As a young man, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre served as a sailor on a trading ship. One cold and stormy night the ship put into the port of Hamburg, Germany. Sartre got off the ship and made his way through the rainy windswept streets to the shelter of a seedy bar. He sat down at a table
and ordered a drink. After a while a beautiful
woman made her way towards his table,
introduced herself and sat down next to him. They began to talk. Finally, after quite some time, the woman excused herself to go to the bathroom. As he sat alone, anticipating her return, Sartre imagined the night that he and the woman would spend together in a hotel room, the seduction, the sex, and ultimately their farewell the next morning. He imagined the letters they would send to one another in anticipation of reunion. He envisioned the story that lay ahead of them. Suddenly, as he awaited her return from the bathroom, Sartre experienced an epiphany. He realized that every moment of his life, including this one, offered a choice. He could either choose to live his life in the fabricated fiction of a story,
or to embrace the discontinuous blips and bleeps of human existence and live without the security of a story. All at once Sartre made the decision. He stood up and walked out of the bar and into the storm and never saw the woman again.”
― Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares

“Listening is a basic ingredient of attention, and it can be learned and
practiced. Listening is fueled by interest and curiosity. It is a discipline
and an action in the world, and the results are nearly magical. Hearing
can restore. To be heard, really heard by another person, is to be healed.”
― Anne Bogart, And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World