After Dancing: Dancers Turn to Writing

Kalamazoo, MI. February 13, 2013 — A former dancer at the acclaimed Martha Graham School and another dancer, trained in the Royal Academy of Dance school, will explore their next step as authors in an upcoming literary reading on the campus of Western Michigan University.

Authors Renee E. D’Aoust and Moira MacDougall will visit WMU's Dance Department at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 26 in WMU’s Dalton Multimedia Room to read from their recent books. The reading will be the culmination of a full day as guest artists in the Dance Department. They will visit classes in Modern Technique, 20th Century American Dance, and Choreography, with professors Carolyn Pavlik, Megan Slayter, and David Curwen.

The reading is free and open to the public. It is hosted by Danna Ephland, poet, and former Dance Department faculty. “Dancers who write bring a startling physicality to the page, embodied writing,” Ephland says.

The reading will feature D'Aoust's "Body of a Dancer" (Etruscan Press), a memoir of narrative essays about her time in New York at the Martha Graham School. Now as a writer, D’Aoust has numerous publications and awards to her credit including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts’ Journalism Institute for Dance Criticism at American Dance Festival. She lives half the year in Switzerland, the other in Idaho, where she manages her family’s forestland.

MacDougall will read from her poetry collection, "Bone Dream" (Tightrope Books), which summons her training in classical ballet and modern dance, as well as her experiences as an Iyengar yoga instructor in poems that "sound the shifting depths of body and spirit." MacDougall is published widely in Canadian and American literary journals and is currently the Poetry Editor for the Literary Review of Canada. She lives in The Beach in Toronto, Ontario. MacDougall is available for interview by contacting her at mac.john@sympatico.ca .  D'Aoust at idahobuzzy@yahoo.com .

From the book jackets:

D’Aoust provides a powerful, acidly comic record of what it is to love, and eventually leave, a life centered on dance. ... Lance Olsen

MacDougall’s vital poetry puts the body first, from a dancer’s gnarled toes to a yogi’s spine….The vigorous poems of Bone Dream burst with the deliberate beauty of the posed body… Molly
Peacock