NYCB Vol. 18 No. 6 - Agon, Diana Adams

Diana Adams on Agon:  “I don't remember ever sitting around discussing dancing with him. Even with something like Agon, I tried not to analyze, because then I might give too much significance to a gesture, like when I put my hand on Arthur's wrist. I knew it wasn't meant to be a sentimental gesture. It had to do with part of a movement and I would spoil it if I started to think about it. In Agon the movements were so intricate that you really didn't think in terms of whose limb was attached to some other limb. You were just trying to negotiate your bodies. In the Pas de Deux what seems to be terribly intimate is simply one movement evolving from another. It was scientific. 

Photos by Martha Swope, 1957

“Balanchine started making Agon with that Pas de Deux for Arthur and me. I was interested in what he was going to do for us, but I accepted it without thinking much about it. Balanchine rehearsals whip you into a frenzy. Keeping up with him was so difficult. I just tried to get the next step and fit them all together, to make them look like what I thought he wanted to see. We used to have hilarious rehearsals in the first part of Agon because we were in three groups and at the end of one section when we cross and go to a different position we were always getting there on a different count. I swore Melissa was one count early each time we arrived at that place, and Balanchine would have to make peace between us. It was very challenging, and I liked that. It gave me less of an opportunity to brood on whether I was going to be good in something or not. I was involved with just doing it. That's how he works. What you are doing is important, not how your personality is being used. It was all totally fused.”

--Balanchine's Ballerinas: Conversations with the Muses by Robert Tracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bx46l2gfZ0