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.
AGNES DE MILLEI learned three important things in college-to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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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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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don’t even look at one another.
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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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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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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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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how… The artists never entirely knows.
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What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.
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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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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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