A Quote by Bo Burnham
It's not most important to communicate myself on stage as it is to be as funny or interesting as I possibly can on stage. I feel more like I'm doing a play whose main character just happens to share my name.
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Doing an album is like having a business card; to show people what you do. The most important thing to me is the stage. I do albums because I love the stage.
I started by doing a little funny story, and then I started going to open mics. I realized I had a lot of work to do - you have to get over the stage fright and get your stage presence up. It took me some time, but I finally feel that I'm at a point where I feel comfortable on stage and giving my point of view.
Stage is so important because it teaches me how to convey character with words - how to convey how a character reacts by the way they appear on stage. I can usually tell a playwright from someone who has never written for the stage. Did the character work? Did the dialogue reveal who the character is?
I've always felt kind of safe on stage, protected. I've talked to other performers about this and they feel the same things, particularly in the live arena. I never get nervous going on stage to do a play. Doing film or television I'll have more butterflies.
I grew up doing stage work as a child and as a teenager, so the stage is my home where I feel most comfortable.
I've reached the stage of my life where learning is so important to me. I go through the past enough when I play my old songs on stage. And I don't mind doing that. But I want to think about the future.
Most of my comedy writing happens through improvisation on stage; doing it in the moment. Going up with an idea and fleshing it out over time on stage and in front of people until it becomes a full bit.
Now I'm able to play on the main stage and play my own tracks and the crowd likes them. I feel like a lot the other DJs play a lot of the same songs, and not to knock them, but it's important to me to go up there and sort of sneak in a bunch of stuff the other guys aren't playing.
I can feel how an audience is reacting when I'm on a stage, but when you are on stage, your perception is distorted. That's something you just have to know. It's like pilots that fly at high Gs and they lose, sometimes, consciousness and hand/eye coordination and they just have to know that that's going to happen. They have to be trained to not try to do too much while they are doing that. So when you are on stage, you have to be aware that you are wrong about how it feels a lot of times.
What happens in the studio is technically the same thing that happens on the stage. In the past I had to make quite brutal adaptations of the material to make it work on stage. I don't always like doing that because sometimes you're shaving away the things that you actually quite like about them, the spontaneity of it.
On stage, I feel like I'm invincible, like nothing bad can happen. I can be myself. I feel like I shrink when I'm off stage.
Somebody like Bowie was so interesting because when you got him off stage, he was like a businessman. But on stage, he was just dazzling. It was like watching butterflies grow.
A stage play is beautiful only when it is seen as a stage play, just like you cannot get the same effect of a live Bharatanatyam performance in a recording.
I guess there's this mind shift that happens once you're on stage. I don't know, chemicals, something happens and you just... I just become completely in control of where I am. And it's all about trusting the people that you're on the stage with, listening... and it just falls into place really easily.
The stage is like a laboratory where you can run theatrical experiments, imposing interesting conditions on the cast or story and seeing how they pan out. Each new play is like creating a tiny virtual universe enclosed by the confines of the stage.
The magic in performing as an entertaining ventriloquist happens when the characters come to life and the interaction between the separate personalities on stage becomes 'real.' Then don't forget that the act has to be funny, and to me, being funny and entertaining any given audience is more important than anything.
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