Politics & Power Quote by Agnes de Mille

The bite here is the double turn: de Mille starts with a psychological diagnosis - theater people as chronic piner-agonsizers - then snaps it shut with a national indictment. The first sentence sounds almost affectionate, like backstage gossip rendered as character study. The second sentence is the trapdoor. In America, she suggests, their neurosis is not vanity but realism: the culture is built to forget them.

As a dancer-choreographer, de Mille is talking from the most perishable edge of performance. Theater already disappears the moment the curtain falls; dance disappears faster, living in muscle memory, not text. Her intent isn’t to mock artists for insecurity so much as to puncture the sentimental story America tells about itself: that talent is naturally rewarded, that greatness inevitably gets archived. She’s arguing the opposite - that attention is fickle, institutions are thin, and cultural memory is outsourced to whatever gets recorded, commodified, and replayed.

The subtext is also classed and industrial. American entertainment prizes novelty and scalability; live theater is neither. If you can’t be rerun, streamed, or franchised, you’re treated as a temporary event, not a lasting contribution. The bleak punchline - “They will be” - lands like a choreographic step: clean, final, almost inevitable.

Context matters: de Mille worked in an era when Broadway and ballet were booming yet still fighting for legitimacy against film, television, and the broader American hunger for the next thing. Her cynicism isn’t despair; it’s a warning to build better memory - or accept that the stage is where art goes to vanish.