Agnes de Mille was one of the greatest ballet and musical choreographers of all time. Her memoir, Dance to the Piper, one of the best books about dance ever published, is now available to a new generation of readers. This humorous and insightful memoir by the choreographer of Oklahoma!, Carousel, and creator of the ballet Rodeo gives readers a glimpse into the enchanting and heartbreaking world of ballet and dance, and into the life of an American legend.
Born into a family of successful playwrights and producers, Agnes de Mille was determined to be an actress. Then one day she witnessed the Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova, and her life was altered forever. Hypnotized by Pavlova’s beauty, in that moment de Mille dedicated herself to dance. Her memoir records with lighthearted humor and wisdom not only the difficulties she faced—the resistance of her parents, the sacrifices of her training—but also the frontier atmosphere of early Hollywood and New York and London during the Depression. “This is the story of an American dancer,” writes de Mille, “a spoiled egocentric wealthy girl, who learned with difficulty to become a worker, to set and meet standards, to brace a Victorian sensibility to contemporary roughhousing, and who, with happy good fortune, participated by the side of great colleagues in a renaissance of the most ancient and magical of all the arts.”
