My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I’d like to know.
AGNES DE MILLEEmily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
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We can’t stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
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Dancers aren’t made of their technique, but their passion.
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To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea.
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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of… freedom and childish play.
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They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.
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Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession.
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But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage.
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The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one’s feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.
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What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.
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One of the good things about my having some recognition is that I can do something for the people
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I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.
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The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.
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Ours is an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat. It keeps pressing us to go farther, to include everything so that we can savor everything, so that we can know everything.
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great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions.
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If you want to understand a nation, look at its dances and listen to its folk songs – don’t pay any attention to its politicians.
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The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
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Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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Dancing is such a despised and dishonored trade that if you tell a doctor or a laywer you do choreography he’ll look at you as if you were a hummingbird.
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I had had to learn the difference between the bearable fatigue and the unbearable, the fatigue of fear. The first can be cured by a night’s sleep; the second kills.
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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble – all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure!
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Dancers don’t get invited to visit people. It is assumed a boy dancer will run off with the spoons and a girl with the head of the house.
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To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.
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From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.
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