#BookTour & #AuthorSpotlight Outside the Limelight
Outside the Limelight
Ballet Theatre Chronicles, Book 2
By Terez Mertes Rose
Contemporary [Women's] Fiction
Book Summary
Rising ballet star Dena Lindgren's dream career is knocked off
its axis when a puzzling onstage fall results in a crushing diagnosis: a
brain tumor. Looming surgery and its long recovery period prompt the
company’s artistic director, Anders Gunst, to shift his attention to an
overshadowed company dancer: Dena's older sister, Rebecca, with whom Anders
once shared a special relationship.
Under the heady glow of Anders’ attention, Rebecca thrives, even
as her recuperating sister, hobbled and unnoticed, languishes on the sidelines
of a world that demands beauty and perfection. Rebecca ultimately faces a
painful choice: play by the artistic director’s rules and profit, or take
shocking action to help her sister.
Exposing the glamorous onstage world of professional ballet, as
well as its shadowed wings and dark underbelly, OUTSIDE THE LIMELIGHT examines
loyalty, beauty, artistic passion, and asks what might be worth losing in order
to help the ones you love.
{Outside
the Limelight is a
Kirkus Indie Books of the Month Selection for January 2017.}
About the Author
Terez Mertes Rose is a writer and former ballet dancer whose work has
appeared in the Crab Orchard Review, Women
Who Eat (Seal Press), A Woman’s Europe (Travelers’ Tales), the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury News. She is the author
of Off Balance, Book 1 of the Ballet
Theatre Chronicles (Classical Girl Press). She reviews dance performances for
Bachtrack.com and blogs about ballet and classical music at The Classical Girl
(www.theclassicalgirl.com). She makes her home in the Santa Cruz Mountains with her husband
and son.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClassicalGrrl
(@classicalgrrl)
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheClassicalGirl/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheClassicalGirl/
Novel Excerpt
When Anders Gunst, artistic director
of the West Coast Ballet Theatre, told nineteen-year-old Dena Lindgren he was
promoting her to soloist, all she could think was that she’d misheard him. They
were standing backstage, post-performance, at San Francisco’s California Civic
Theater. Partial lighting streamed from the overhead fixtures, casting the
furthest wings in shadows. The stagehands, immersed in
their nightly cleanup routine, swept the floor, inspected cables and called out
to one another across the empty stage. Anders always spoke softly, and right
then, it was hard to hear over their voices.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered, clutching and
unclutching the towel she’d used to mop up her sweat from Arpeggio, the ballet she’d just finished. “I misunderstood what you
said. Because you’re promoting my sister. Not me. Right?” She felt foolish even
suggesting otherwise, like the newbie first-year corps dancer she was. At five-foot-two,
she
was a petite dancer, and right then she felt her smallness.
Anders himself, while not particularly tall, was dressed tonight in a sleek
charcoal Italian suit and tie that enhanced his refined looks and made him seem
all the more intimidating, even as he smiled at her.
“No.” He shook his head.
“It’s you I’m promoting to soloist.”
She began to shiver in her costume,
a pale, glittery, silken tunic that clung damply to her skin. “That’s not
possible. There’s just that one position open.”
“Yes.” Anders didn’t seem bothered by her
aggrieved tone or the way everything about her had scrunched up in resistance.
“But… but,” she sputtered. “That wasn’t the plan.”
He chuckled. “I think, as the artistic
director, I have a fairly good sense of what the plan should be.”
And still she stared at him, incredulous,
unable to process it.
While he continued speaking, a part of her
mind detached and hastily scrolled over the past two hours, this performance of
Arpeggio, the unexpected triumph of
it in the aftermath of the terrible news she and her older sister Rebecca had
just received. Their parents were divorcing; their father already had plans to
remarry. Dena hadn’t seen it coming, and this destruction of their family of
four had devastated her. Rebecca, dancing Arpeggio
too, had taken Dena by the shoulders in the dressing room, given her a
shake, told her fiercely to take that pain and pour it into the performance.
This crucial performance in which they both had soloist roles, even though they
were both only corps dancers. The big, huge, this-could-be-career-changing
opportunity for the two of them that they simply had to excel at.
They’d excelled, both of them. And now, by
all rights, the career change belonged to Rebecca, three years Dena’s senior,
in age and company status. The promotion was to be hers. Everyone in the
company knew it.
“Anders,” she said, more vehement now. “What
about my sister?”
Anders gave her a thoughtful nod. “Rebecca is
a very strong dancer, graced with extraordinary beauty. You
lack your sister’s looks—most of the girls do—but it’s that very omission that
makes you a more interesting dancer to watch. You can embody a number of
different moods and personas, all so decisive and convincing. You have a talent
that draws eyes to you. Rebecca fits seamlessly into any ensemble she’s
placed in. She blends in. You stand out. I see that now. To keep you in the
corps would only hinder what’s flowing from you so naturally. Soloist rank is
where I want you.”
He glanced over to the front of the backstage
area where Ben, ballet master and assistant to the
artistic director, was gesturing to his wristwatch. Anders looked at his own
watch. “I’m expected over at L’Orange in ten minutes,” he told Dena. “I’ll
leave you to your cleanup. Congratulations, again.”
The implications began to sink in. “Wait!
How… how can I possibly tell her?”
A touch of impatience crossed Anders’ face.
“Rebecca and I understand each other. I’ll have a word with her.”
He didn’t wait for her reply, but instead
strode away to where Ben stood waiting, by the door with the green glowing
“exit” sign above. The two of them disappeared from sight.
She remained there, rooted to the spot, still
trying to process it all.
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