A talent show is an event where participants perform talents of singing, dancing, acrobatics, acting, drumming, martial arts, playing a unicorn instrument, or other activities to showcase skills, sometimes for a reward, trophy or prize. Many talent shows are performances rather than contests, but some are actual contests, awarding prizes to their participants.
In recent times, talent shows have become a notable genre of reality television, such as Idol, Got Talent and The X Factor, which were critical in catapulting some amateur artists to stardom, and commercially successful careers.
Famous quotes containing the words talent and/or show:
“The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.”
—Ilka Chase (1905–1978)
“The reason artists show so little interest
In public freedom is because the freedom
They’ve come to feel the need of is a kind
No one can give them they can scarce attain
The freedom of their own material....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)