I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
AGNES DE MILLEOurs 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.
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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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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I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.
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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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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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My heroines are part of me and my heroes are part of what I’d like to know.
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But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises.
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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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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
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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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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 -
Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
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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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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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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 dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.
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When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience.
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great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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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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I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
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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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Dance in the body you have.
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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of… freedom and childish play.
AGNES DE MILLE