I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.
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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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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The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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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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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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Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don’t even look at one another.
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Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.
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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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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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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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The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.
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But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage.
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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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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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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!
AGNES DE MILLE