To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea.
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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The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind.
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From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.
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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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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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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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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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I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.
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What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
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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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Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
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Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
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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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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