Dance to the Piper by Agnes De Mille

Dance to the Piper by Agnes De Mille

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.

Joan Acocella is a New Yorker staff writer who focuses on dance and books. She's also contributed to publications such as The New York Review of Books and The Wall Street Journal. Mark Morris: A Critical Biography, Constructing Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, and Willa Cather and the Politics of Critique are among her works. She co-edited Vaslav Nijinsky's unabridged Diary and André Levinson on Dancing with Lynn Garafola. A Guggenheim Fellowship was awarded to Acocella. She is a New Yorker.