The De Mille legacy - dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1994 by Clive Barnes

Through one of those many tiny ironies by which Life lets us know it's still there, Agnes de Mille's usual seats for American Ballet Theatre performances at the Metropolitan Opera House were directly in front of my own. Therefore I had to sit through countless Lizzie Bordens administering countless whacks, see dozens of Cowgirls get their men, and watch inumerable Virgins foolishly lose it to Hell, all the time breathing down Agnes's bristling neck. In many ways I was not her greatest admirer--as she knew all too well--yet there we were, stuck with one another, an odd couple on the same side of the aisle but with rather different aesthetic viewpoints.

I last saw her at what was to be her final public appearance, a special gala performance given by ABT in her honor at the Met on June 7, 1993. The program was The Informer, Three Virgins and a Devil, and Rodeo, and Agnes gave one of her great speeches on the care and sustenance of the arts. And, naturally, she and her ballets received especially heartfelt ovations, of the kind ballet audiences the world over reserve for someone who has become, through a combination of genius, distinction, and age, peculiarly their own.

As usual, she was sitting right in front of me, and when I gave her a respectful kiss on the cheek (once when I kissed her she smilingly snarled, "Ah, sweet Judas!") I thought how frail she was. And I remembered something she had said to me a year or so before: "I do wish you had liked my ballets as much as you seem to like me." But I didn't just like Agnes. Prickly though she always was also the embodiment of the American spirit and Yankee know-how and in some strange way she was lovable. And in some strage way she was lovable. And in some strange way I loved her. I even liked her ballets more than she--to whom anything that was not a bouquet was, as Richard Buckle once noted of Frederick Ashton, a bomb--ever imagined or conceded. Or, in her oddly confident heart, cared.

Agnes de Mille was one of the architects of American ballet and one of our greatest native-born choreographers--one who set American cowboys dancing. A wonderfully witty individual, she was clever and tireless, ornery but never ordinary, I remember her slightly as a dancer. Comparatively late in the day--at a gala, accompanied by Lucia Chase, as I recall it--she was cavorting gamely in Three Virgins, and I also saw her very last appearance as the Cowgirl in Rodeo at Covent Garden in 1956. At the time I said that her performance was "gallant and, in terms of sheer physical stamina, would have been a credit to a woman many years her junior ... even if we were not able completely to suspend our belief that time has passed." She was, after all, fifty-one year old. Sprightly, but ...

In any case, she had by then probably already grown accustomed to my praising her with faint damns (she was, incidentally, very aware of the what and the who of everything written about her, but surprisingly seemed less sensitive to criticism than do many artists who are far less surface-prickly), because from the time I encountered her choregraphy--Tally-Ho and Three Virgins, when Ballet Theater first came to London in 1946--I had been rather less than underwhelmed by it, regarding it as well crafted but derivative (for example, from Eugene Loring in Rodeo--an influence disputed by the Mille--and from Anthony Tudor and Martha Graham in Fall River Legend). But as a writer, lecturer, and dance personality-in-general I thought her matchless.

Born in New York on September 18, 1905 (she would later engagingly shave off four years for the reference books), grandaughter of political economist Henry George (proponent of the Single tax), daughter of film producer William C. de Mille, and niece of the great director Cecil B. DeMille, she had a Hollywood childhool--later she recalled going to school with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., "a fat youngster in a sailor suit." Her interest in dance was sparked when as a child she saw Pavlova, Nijinsky, and, later, Isadora Ducan, "a fat, cross-eyed woman in dull costumes." After desultory studies at the University of California, the young Agnes started her dance training with Theodore Kosloff.

By 1928 she was dancing in the Grand Street Follies in New York. Soon she was studying with Martha Graham and giving recitals in Paris and London. In London during the thirties she became associated with Marie Rambert's Ballet Club abd its choreographers Ashton and, particularly, Tudor. She created a role in the first performance of Dark Elegies--and even, oddly enough and perhaps unconsciously, incorporated part of her dance into the Champion Roperhs entr' acte exit in Rodeo. And, talking of Rodeo, she would claim that she had already worked out those "horse-riding" movements and pantomine in London, prior to seeing Loring's Billy the Kid. But when I asked Peggy Van Praagh, one of the English dancers concerned, firmly said: "Not really--it was basically different."

London behind her, and the war in Europe about to start, de Mille was, on her return to New York in 1939, ready for her great adventure. She became part of the company Richard Pleasant was forming, what is today American Ballet Theatre. For that company in 1940 she created Black Ritual, her first major work, and one with an allblack cast. Her most important contibution in those early days, however, was in getting Tudor. Pleasant had invited Ashton to join the company, and when he received no reply (the letter went to the wrong address and was returned, unopened months later; otherwise Ashton might very wel have accepted), it was de Mille who assured him that it was Tudor he needed in the first place. The rest is Ballet Theatre's history.