In 1993, Renee D'Aoust won a scholarship at the renowned Martha Graham studio in New York City. The young dancer moved from Montana into a studio flat on West 51st Street and entered a world where her successes and failures were measured in damaged body parts. At her first exercise, classmates unconcernedly danced around "a large spot of dried blood in the center of the main studio floor." The grown-up world of modern dance is not for the weak.
Body of a Dancer is a memoir laid out in 12 acts, tackling events that stretch both her will and her body. When the artist's "instrument" is her body, the tortuous training necessary to properly execute the choreographer's vision is the heart of the story. And so D'Aoust must develop a spine that "is supposed to be unnaturally straight, straighter than a heterosexual," and her legs must easily "kiss her ears." She must also constrain the movement of her "bodacious breasts," for "all dancers were expected to be aspens now--not cottonwoods."
D'Aoust describes in great candor and plainspoken wit all the idiosyncrasies of dancers and their necessary sacrifices: "Leave home, leave country, forget secondary education, forget any guarantee of a stable income, destroy naïve innocence about the body." For all the pain and suffering, however, her years in competitive New York dance also taught her "in so many ways to be freer than you ever have in your life," she writes. "You're over thirty, and you don't give a damn what anyone thinks of you. You like the cackle lines around your mouth and eyes." That kind of wisdom may be worth the blood on the studio floor. –-Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kans.