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.
AGNES DE MILLEModern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don’t even look at one another.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
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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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Find the passion. It takes great passion and great energy to do anything creative. I would go so far as to say you can’t do it without that passion.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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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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Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
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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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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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Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
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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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great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions.
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From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.
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The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they’re afraid that they’ll be forgotten. And in America they’re quite right. They will be.
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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 studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
AGNES DE MILLE






