In a memoir that Lance Olsen calls “fascinating, horrifying, unfalteringly honest”, award-winning writer Renée D’Aoust draws from her experiences as a modern dancer in New York City during the nineties.

Trained at the prestigious Martha Graham Center, D’Aoust intertwines accounts of her own and other dancers’ lives with essays on modern dance history. Her luminous prose spotlights this passionate, often brutal world.

Scarred, strained, and tough, bearing witness to the discipline demanded by the art form, Body of a Dancer provides a powerful, acidly comic record of what it is to love, and eventually leave, a life centred on dance.