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.
AGNES DE MILLEWhat I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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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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Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
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Dance in the body you have.
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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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So that we don’t go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak.
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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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My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I’d like to know.
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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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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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This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.
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In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door.
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We can’t stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
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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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When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience.
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So that we will miss nothing. Partly it’s greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.
AGNES DE MILLE