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When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience. I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.

Agnes de Mille

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Agnes de Mille
Age: 88 †
Born: 1905
Born: September 18
Died: 1993
Died: October 6
Ballet Dancer
Ballet Master
Choreographer
Dancer
Theatrical Director
Harlem
New York
Rather
Absorbed
Music
Respond
Really
Performing
Dance
Completely
Choose
Steps
Audience
Meditating

More quotes by Agnes de Mille

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The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.
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No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.
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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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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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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. What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.
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Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.
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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, 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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We can't stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.
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Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
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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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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. 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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The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind. From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.
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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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Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down... and kissed him. And the world cracked open.
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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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Dance in the body you have.
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