Starched and exacting, she carried the efficacious demeanor of Madame Giry, the formidable choreographer of the corps de ballet in the musical The Phantom of the Opera. One could picture her coolly running a New England finishing school. She had a playful side, of course — a merry mirth that would flash across her face like a passing breeze — but it was when she was most ambitious, most focused, most relentless that she created the works that made her a legend.
Born in 1905, Agnes de Mille ’26 had theatricality in her blood: She was the daughter of a successful playwright and the niece of the director Cecil B. DeMille, one of the titans of 20th-century cinema. A creative, carefree child, she longed to be an actress but was told she wasn’t pretty enough, so she pivoted. She went on to create some of the most innovative and stunning works in the history of American performance, the first being the ballet The Rodeo, inspired by the time she danced a hoedown alone. Her most famous work is her choreography for the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, where her whooping, balletic movements transformed a hokey tale of romance on the Plains into a display of exuberant joy.
The proverbial odd duck — she wore crazy clothes “out of Dumas’ Antoinette romances,” she later recalled — by her sophomore year de Mille was crafting clever dances and skits she performed with her fellow students all around campus.
But before she could find her footing as a choreographer, Agnes de Mille had to find herself first, and she did — as a student at UCLA. Her family had moved to Southern California to follow Uncle Cecil. Agnes’ mother, aiming to keep a tight leash on her dreamer of a daughter, had overruled her living away at college; UCLA was in walking distance. As de Mille’s biographer, Carol Easton, wrote, UCLA’s “lecture halls sizzled with their ideas and idealism,” and the young English major found herself enthralled with both learning and the creative opportunities the lush campus afforded. The proverbial odd duck — she wore crazy clothes “out of Dumas’ Antoinette romances,” she later recalled — by her sophomore year she was crafting clever dances and skits she performed with her fellow students all around campus. In 1925, a university bulletin gushed that those who saw de Mille perform “will have something to remember when their youth is over.”
She graduated in 1926, but it would be another decade before she came into her own. Set to Aaron Copland’s Americana-style score, 1942’s The Rodeo contained all of the playful flourishes that came to be associated with de Mille: swaying and prancing, joyful lifts and skittering slides. As Easton later observed, the movements “incorporated influences as disparate as classical ballet, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and tennis.”
Those movements foreshadowed de Mille’s work on Oklahoma!, which became one of the biggest smashes in the history of American musical theater and her signature work. Her choreography was whimsical and amusing, a collection of wry smiles, suppressed longings and playful admonitions rolled and roped into galloping eurhythmics. Its high point was the “Dream Ballet,” a dark, foreboding 18-minute interlude in which the heroine, Laurey, falls asleep and conjures the consequences of her foolish romantic choices. It was bold for a Broadway musical to, in effect, slam on the brakes to afford a lengthy balletic dream sequence smack in the middle of the story. Rodgers and Hammerstein had pictured an upbeat circus; de Mille was having none of it. “Laurey’s scared to death,” she told them. “Laurey’s anxious. And dreams of anxiety are not like a circus. They’re full of horror and ominous doom.”
Reviewing Oklahoma!, the New York Times declared that “there is more comedy in one of Miss de Mille’s gay little passages than in many of the other Broadway tom-tom beats together.” De Mille would go on to a legendary Tony-winning career, choreographing such musical theater classics as Carousel, Brigadoon, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Paint Your Wagon.
At the Kennedy Center Honors in 1980, actress Kitty Carlisle lauded the way in which de Mille had “introduced laughter — gutsy, American laughter — into the prim and formal opera houses and concert halls of this country.” As for de Mille, she never failed to credit UCLA for having given her the space to grow into her creative self. In an interview with Dick Cavett at the time of the Honors, she said of her professors, “These people put a love of the language in me, in my conscience.” It was a love that would manifest in movement. “To dance,” de Mille once said, “is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.”
Watch Agnes de Mille discuss her choreography for Rodeo
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Summer 2023 issue.
