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.
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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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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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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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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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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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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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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I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
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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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Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
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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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So that we will miss nothing. Partly it’s greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.
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When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience.
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The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
AGNES DE MILLE