A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.
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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I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.
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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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One of the good things about my having some recognition is that I can do something for the people
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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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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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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.
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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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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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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
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Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
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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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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
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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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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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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