Agnes De Mille’s Artistic Justice

Of the choreographer Agnes de Mille it has been said that she was a better writer than she was a choreographer. That’s not the way she planned it. She made twenty-one ballets and the dances for fifteen musicals, and she worked on them till her brain practically bled. She had several huge successes, above all, her cowboy ballet, Rodeo (1942), plus the dances for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945). By the end of the 1940s she was the best-known choreographer in America. What remains in repertory today, however, is just Rodeo and two lesser ballets, Three Virgins and a Devil (1941) and Fall River Legend (1948). As for her writing, she claimed she did it, or at least began doing it, quite casually, “whenever I had fifteen minutes to spare, on buses, subways, in dressing rooms, in drugstores, at times in the waiting room of the Children’s Hospital. The manuscript consisted of letter paper, wrapping paper, programs, envelopes, paper napkins…. A great deal of it was written with a child crawling around my neck or being sick on my lap…” In time she wrote eleven books that together constitute the most searching and intelligent report, and the only comprehensive insider’s report, on the great development of which she was part, the establishment of dance as a theater art in America in the early twentieth century. The best of the eleven volumes—the most spontaneous-seeming, the most poignant, and also the most fun—is the first, the one she implies she delivered to the editor in a shopping bag: her memoir Dance to the Piper (1951).