SANDPOINT - The world of the professional dancer can be a disorienting place, where movement is prescribed and personal opinion is prohibited.

Local author Renee D'Aoust broke this code of silence in her just-published memoir titled "Body of a Dancer." In the book, she takes the reader deep inside New York's modern dance scene of the 1990s - a time of scintillating creativity, unbridled competition and iron-fisted artistic control.

Although the chapters fly by in classic page-turner fashion, taking this trip with D'Aoust is not easy. The first chapter serves as a rite of passage for the reader, as much an initiation as an introduction to what the author calls "the tough, passionate world" of dance. The reward for paying this price of admission is a backstage pass to a place where sweat pours and muscles pull under the constant, unyielding gaze of mirrored walls.

Like the artists themselves, if you make the cut during this literary audition, you are allowed into the inner sanctum of the professional dance studio.

And the studio D'Aoust takes us into is none other than the celebrated Martha Graham School, where she trained and danced and did exactly as she was told.

"It was very traditional and old school," she said. "You were told to shut up and dance. If you didn't, you were out.

"As a dancer, I was always taught not to speak up," D'Aoust went on. "But I thought, 'If I'm going to write about dancing, I've got to speak up.'"

With that internal dialog unleashed, she shared the rigor involved in getting the human body to execute what, for those in the audience, appears to be almost impossible feats of agility and grace. Along with that, the book moves through stories of elation, humiliation and personal triumph as the author finally finds success outside of the Graham School.

The creator and namesake of the institution had only recently died when D'Aoust attended classes there after first being trained as a dancer at Pacific Northwest Ballet. In Graham's absence, her vision sat trapped in amber as those who ran the school struggled to determine how best to continue her legacy. It wasn't until she left the center that D'Aoust realized how insular and restricting the environment had become.

Her memoir tells of the night she attended a performance by her former colleagues and found that sitting in the audience was the thing that set her free.

"I felt a tug of longing to be up there dancing, but at the same time I knew, 'No - that's not me,'" the writer said. "That was the moment of release when I realized that I'd made the right decision to leave."

Beyond the dance studio, "Body of a Dancer" is a fascinating tour into New York in the '90s, when the city still was seen as the crucible for talent and artists of every stripe made the pilgrimage to see if they had what it takes to make it. In that light, D'Aoust explained, the quest for success is more than a subtext - it's the book's true theme.

Her perceived reading audience includes former dancers - what D'Aoust refers to as "the anonymous dancer" - as well as virtually anyone who harbors artistic aspirations.

"My hope is that the book would speak to people with those creative dreams," she said. "I think of it as the 'artistic everyman' - people who were in the performing arts and left it, but still want that resonance of the experience.

"It's a creative exploration of what it takes to put yourself out there against all the odds," she added.

The author now has turned her creative energies to writing, which she describes as being "more solitary and sedentary" than movement art. These days, she spends half the year in Idaho, where she teaches at North Idaho College and manages her family's stewardship forestland, and the other half in Switzerland. Widely published as an award-winning writer of dance reviews and critical essays, she views her new memoir as the step that carried her well and truly into literary life.

"I spent more time writing the book than I actually spent dancing," D'Aoust said. "To me, it's very much a dance book, but I also meant it to be for my fellow writers, because I saw doing it as my way to really become a writer."

Dancing, she continued, is ephemeral, where writing lasts - one of her reasons for getting into writing in the first place. And yet, she continues to feel the tug of a world where art is created in three dimensions, where its flows through space, not just onto the page.

"People say, 'Once you've been a dancer, you're always a dancer,'" D'Aoust said. "I didn't believe that until I stopped dancing."

Home alone, however, she still loves to put on songs like the Dire Straits' "Walk of Life" and bound around the house in rhythm to the music.

"I definitely dance with my dog," D'Aoust said. "It's great, because I can do the same moves over and over - the moves I love."

Renee D'Aoust will stage a reading from her memoir on Dec. 10 at 1:30 p.m. in the Sandpoint branch of the East Bonner County Library, which also has copies of the book available to check out. Locally, the book is sold at Vanderford's in downtown Sandpoint.

For more information, visit: www.reneedaoust.com