It takes hours daily of blind instinctive moving and fumbling to find the revealing gesture, and the process goes on for weeks before I am ready to start composing… . This is the kernel, the nucleus of the dance. All the design develops from this.
—Agnes de Mille,
Dance to the Piper
To be a dancer in America in the Thirties and Forties—the decades when Martha Graham was moving earth with her flexed foot, Eugene Loring was playing Cowboys and Indians to Copland, Antony Tudor was pulling G-force expressionism from a classicism in stays, Jerome Robbins was coining character with a jukebox genius for vernacular, and George Balanchine was taking dictation from God (lightning speed, cat-paw quiet) and a footnote from Fred Astaire (that swingy, selfless style)—to dance was a vocation. No one has written better about the calling than Agnes de Mille, herself a groundbreaking choreographer in those landmark years. De Mille’s books are gems of eyewitness reporting and insight, and especially radiant are the discussions she had with Graham, a best friend and very much the big sister. Their conversations were always about the search, the struggle, the don’t compromise, the divine, even if it was sometimes what Graham called “divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching …” Onward, Choreographic Soldiers.
“Quickening” was another Graham word, as in “a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening.” It too has a religious connotation, the moment, according to Aquinas, when a soul
