The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
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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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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Dance in the body you have.
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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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Destiny is made known silently.
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The practice mirror is to be used for the correction of faults, not for a love affair, and the figure you watch should not become your dearest friend.
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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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I 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.
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The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience.
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A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.
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What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.
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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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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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I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
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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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The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.
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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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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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What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
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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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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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Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how… The artists never entirely knows.
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We can’t stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
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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.
AGNES DE MILLE