Dance constitutes a true recapturing of… freedom and childish play.
AGNES DE MILLEWhen I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience.
More Agnes de Mille Quotes
-
-
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 MILLE -
Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don’t even look at one another.
AGNES DE MILLE -
Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
AGNES DE MILLE -
Ours is an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat. It keeps pressing us to go farther, to include everything so that we can savor everything, so that we can know everything.
AGNES DE MILLE -
But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises.
AGNES DE MILLE -
The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
AGNES DE MILLE -
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.
AGNES DE MILLE -
This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.
AGNES DE MILLE -
Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
AGNES DE MILLE -
Destiny is made known silently.
AGNES DE MILLE -
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
AGNES DE MILLE -
What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.
AGNES DE MILLE -
My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I’d like to know.
AGNES DE MILLE -
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.
AGNES DE MILLE -
No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
AGNES DE MILLE -
The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.
AGNES DE MILLE -
The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind.
AGNES DE MILLE -
Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
AGNES DE MILLE -
I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
AGNES DE MILLE -
In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door.
AGNES DE MILLE -
A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.
AGNES DE MILLE -
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.
AGNES DE MILLE -
From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.
AGNES DE MILLE -
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!
AGNES DE MILLE -
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 MILLE -
Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
AGNES DE MILLE