Daily Inspiration Quote by Agnes de Mille

De Mille’s line lands like a stage light swung suddenly toward the audience: the “sinister portent” isn’t just in the choreography, it’s in what choreography has started to confess about the culture producing it. Coming from a dancer-choreographer who helped define mid-century American theatrical dance, this isn’t a cranky dismissal of modernism so much as a diagnostic. She’s reading bodies as headlines.

“Modern dancers” signals a break from ballet’s courtly prettiness and Broadway’s legible storytelling. Modern dance foregrounds torque, contraction, collapse, tension - movement that looks like struggle rather than ease. De Mille’s choice of “give” implies evidence, almost testimony: these dancers aren’t inventing darkness for fashion; they’re registering it. “Portent” is a loaded, quasi-prophetic word, suggesting that art doesn’t merely reflect a moment but warns of what the moment is becoming.

The subtext is anxious and moral without being puritanical. De Mille admired craft, clarity, and the audience’s ability to feel a story through physical precision. Modern dance, in her view, can read as a culture losing shared grammar: fewer common narratives, more fragmentation; less faith in institutions, more embodied disquiet. The “sinister” isn’t necessarily political propaganda, but an atmosphere - the postwar hangover, the Cold War’s dread, the creeping sense that progress can also be mechanized alienation.

It works because it treats dance as a seismograph. When speech gets managed and polite, the body starts telling the truth, and sometimes the truth looks like a warning.