Viola Spolin Quotes (4 Quotes)

We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything. This is as true for the infant moving from kicking to crawling to walking as it is for the scientist with his equations. If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach.

The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience there is no theater. Every technique learned by the actor, every curtain, every flat on the stage, every careful analysis by the director, every coordinated scene, is for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, our evaluators, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.

Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.

There are few places outside his own play where a child can contribute to the world in which he finds himself. His world dominated by adults who tell him what to do and when to do it --benevolent tyrants who dispense gifts to their ''good'' subjects and punishment to their ''bad'' ones, who are amused at the ''cleverness'' of children and annoyed by their ''stupidities.''