People discover themselves in relation to their grasp of the external world.

Jacques Lecoq

Poetry and art depend on our ability to recount events through the imperfections of our memories. What really counts is how we transform events through the distorting lens of memory. It's the blurred, invented aspects of story telling that give it's beauty and it's greatness. People complain about the unreliability of memory, but we should rejoice in it. Use it as a creative tool.

Robert LePage

When people sit around with a few drinks and tell stories about the past, they take a step out of their present and suspend their consciousness of now. Yet taking a trip back in this way also alters the sensation of the present: old thoughts and feelings, and the filter-of-the-moment blends with an old filter with which the world was once viewed. Historical and personal memories combine to activate a process in the mind. A performance must stimulate this mechanism of memory somehow; it must take the audience to a place where something new or unexpected can happen; it must wake them up to their own uncovered thoughts.

Goat Island

The tendency, in critical responses to the work, to emphasis the 'real' as opposed to the pretend is testimony to the success of the pretending.

Romeo Castellucci

The human brain is wired to see things in something else, to make connections. We automatically read symbols. And that is how art works. Theatre as an art form has gotten a little stuck in thinking that we have to show what we think something looks like. You need to do very little. The brains of an audience have an energy and a power to transform, it is there for you to use.

Tim Crouch

I use cruelty in the sense of a hungering after life, cosmic strictness, relentless necessity... Theatre in the sense of constant creation, a wholly magic act, obeys this necessity. A play without this desire, this blind zest for life, capable of surpassing everything seen in every gesture or every act, in the transcendent aspect of the plot, would be useless and a failure as theatre.

Antonin Artaud

Purity is death! Chaos is necessary to creation, but 'chaos' must be organised, allowing each person to put down roots and develop his own creative rhythms.

Jacques Lecoq

Different schools of theatre come and go. A new playwright emerges. But I don't see much hope in any of this because I don't believe it begins to grapple with the essential problem. How to make theatre absolutely and fundamentally necessary to people, as necessary as eating and sex? I mean theatre isn't a watered down appendage or cultural decoration to life. I mean something that's a simple organic necessary- as theatre used to be and still is in certain societies. Make believe is necessary. It's a quality, lost to Western industrialised societies, I'm searching for.

Peter Brooke

Maybe we don't need to know the whole truth of the universe. We may not be ready for it. Maybe it's best that we get bits and pieces slowly, as a process of becoming. Perhaps what we should concentrate on is being comfortable with not understanding everything that is going on. Perhaps we should be comfortable with not seeing everything. After all, the beginning of knowledge is not knowing.

Goat Island

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