🎶 Dew In the Bracken 🎶

Kvothe's sounds of sunset, shadow, sea and "sad" - the inspirational spark for a few dozen dances

The playlist that started it all began with one specific scene. Kvothe and his lute at a spring-fed pool beneath the shadow-and-light dappling of the trees:

Make no mistake, I was not myself.

Of course I played. It was my only solace.

Eventually I could play from when I woke up until the time I slept. I stopped playing the songs I knew and started inventing new ones… Some of those songs have stayed with me to this day.

Soon after that, I began playing…how can I describe it?

I began to play something other than songs. When the sun warms the grass and the breeze cools you, it feels a certain way. I would play until I got the feeling right. I would play until it sounded like Warm Grass and Cool Breeze… I remember spending nearly three whole days trying to capture Wind Turning a Leaf.

By the end of the second month, I could play things nearly as easily as I saw and felt them: Sun Setting Behind the Clouds, Bird Taking a Drink, Dew in the Bracken.

Somewhere in the third month I stopped looking outside and started looking inside for things to play. I learned to play Riding in the Wagon with Ben, Singing with Father by the Fire, Watching Shandi Dance, Grinding Leaves When It Is Nice Outside, Mother Smiling…

Needless to say, playing these things hurt, but it was a hurt like tender fingers on lute strings. I bled a bit and hoped that I would callous soon.

~Kvothe in one of the chapters that my book automatically falls open to now: Chapter 19 - “Fingers and Strings,” The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

This whole chapter - the way Kvothe uses music to scrape himself back into shreds that are capable of preparing food and stuffing it into his slack gob, walking, eventually making decisions, and even conversing with humans again… this scene summed up, in a dramatized fashion, what dance once was to me.

Dance is one of the things that has saved me at my lowest, time and again. When the loss of dancing has BEEN what brought me low, the obsessive need to get it back has driven me to my limits and catapulted beyond them.

Music is what propels me through that anguish like no other motivator.

At the most painful times of my life, dance became everything I had no words to describe. It transformed into all that I dared not speak. While in motion to music, it was often the only time that I felt like I could convey, truly and fully, what I was feeling. Dance took the place of expressing what was on my mind when words were too often misunderstood, spurned, or used against me.

Most of my reasons for using art in this way are different from Kvothe’s (thankfully), but they still stem from the same place: shoving horrible memories to the back of one’s mind while tiptoeing along the precipice of madness. Dance, theater, music, storytelling, character creation, world building, scribbling words onto paper or pounding them into a keyboard—this is what kept me from slipping off the edge, or at least from falling too far.

But this type of instinctual art therapy brought me silver linings, just like it did for Kvothe. All those hours he spent embodying the sounds of his surroundings gave his music peculiar, distinctive qualities. So it was for me. All those hours I spent learning to embody Bonfire Beneath the Stars and Shimmering Fish Swimming and Breeze Toying with My Veil transformed my belly dancing into…MY dancing. Eventually, it gave me my Elements System.

Just like learning to play on six strings—twang! And then five—twang! And then four gave Kvothe a masterful understanding of his instrument and quick-acting dexterity amidst the mishaps of stage (or sabotage), when I had to re-learn how to dance on a battered body I gained a deeper foundation—even though my concrete slab now has some cracks in it.

I also gained a vaster, more creative vocabulary because there have been many times when I couldn’t use certain body parts. So I’ve had to jerry-rig and experiment, to imagine and invent, re-learning how to embody the music in a different way.

Over and over.

Now, during those precious years when I’m playing on at least six strings, instead of the seven I started out with, my arsenal is vaster than it ever could have been if I’d never been forced to get so creative.

Having to re-learn how to play finger cymbals all over again—or simply clap in time with the music—taught me how to teach, and it taught me how to learn. How to let myself be a beginner again although I was technically a pro. How to let myself feel stupid and clumsy as an adult, and to struggle with something until I figured it out.

It taught me to enjoy the struggle.

(Sometimes. Other times it just pure sucks. That’s what profanity and trash cans are for. Wut? The project doesn’t stay in the trash. Only long enough to make me feel better by flipping it off.) 😜

Art that is born of this place… that is ripped from the depths of one’s soul… that stitches you back together… that fills in the holes where the lost pieces can’t be found… that glues broken seams together with gold...¹

This kind of art touches people in a way they often don’t know how to express in words.

Fitting, I’d say, since it was my lack of words that created it.

And so, after a performance as someone takes my hands and fumbles for phrases that can do justice to what’s going on in their chests and their guts and their coursing blood, I must listen with my eyes fixed upon theirs. I must hear what they speak in their tone and tempo, in their subtle and overt gestures, in the way their voice catches, or the rhythm of their breath.

No problem.

I’ve been listening for the Feel inside sounds all my life.

Kvothe playing on only six strings at the Eolian after his lute was sabotaged - one of the many glorious illustrations by Dan Dos Santos inside the red-paged 10th Anniversary Edition of Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

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The last time I was struck by the post-book depression that always hits me upon finishing the final word of the last book in my favorite fantasy series that we have so far—with its excruciating cliffhanger—the only way I could think to console myself was to make a playlist.

Nothing new there. I’m an 80s child and music is one of my obsessions.

With my mind a-swirl in the images of Kvothe and all his badass musician-friends playing at the Eolian, I started dragging song after song into a new playlist. I called it “Dew In the Bracken,” and it was filled with music that called to mind elemental themes, nature sounds, outdoor scents, tavern scents, and emotional moments.

Once I had gobs of songs dragged there, I started to dance. Night after night, I put on that playlist and let the music become my puppet-master. On the third night, I had to denude the list of all the songs that sounded too modern for this fantastical, magical, grungy, wild world.²

Satisfied, I danced again. But on the fifth night, I wanted to dance certain moods, and the songs were in no particular order, so I started grouping them by flavor.

After two days of this, I realized what I was doing.

I was grouping them by the distinctive plot arcs and settings in the books.

• Trouper Style with the Fam on the Road

• Cinder & Tarbean (grief, loss, anguish & fear)

• Faery, Forests & Felurian

• Ademre & Ketan (learning martial arts)

• Being a Covert Innkeeper at the Waystone with Bast & Chronicler

• Learning Magic & Jackassery

• MoonFae Auri & the Underthing

• Swooning, Mooning & Buffooning Over the Elusive Denna

• And of course, all those Dew In the Bracken, Warm Grass & Cool Breeze songs

This organizational project turned into a full blown hyperfixated, down-the-rabbit-hole dive. I was super stressed about some stuff and needed a weekend OFF. So I let myself do what I’ve done for my own novels since back in the days of cassette tapes.

I made a musical blow-by-blow of the Kingkiller plotlines.³

This led me to the discovery of new musicians and albums that had been literally inspired by these books, which inspired me to then seek out other perfect songs that reminded me of my favorite moments and scenes.

C’mon, we’re filling heart-holes here, remember? This book series has been left on Cliffhanger since 2011. (Auri’s novella in 2014 only made it worse, not better.) 🤣

Naturally, being an 80s mixtape girl, I gave the playlist a name—“Kvothe: Chasing the Name of the Wind.” Then I gave the songs their alternate names that only aficionados of the books will truly understand. Names like:

• You May Have Heard of Me

• A Liar and a Thief

• But No. (of course there wouldn’t be music)

• Pike.

• The Ever-Changing Wind

• Mommet: And now for my next feat!

• Kvothe. I’m Telling You Three Times. (all sorts of super-duper fantastic ideas!!!)

• Malfeasance

• distractible owl

• *Respect, curiosity, amazed respect*

• Seven Words

From that point on…

Well, the hyperfixation is strong with this one, so I played this mixtape monstrosity everywhere and everywhen and I danced to it every night. I also danced to it in the kitchen while cooking. In the bathroom after showering. At stop lights while waiting. The costumes and choreographies happened next, and thus it has been for the past year-and-a-half. We’re up to green screen trials and final costume choices now before hammering down choreographies or improvisational theories.⁴

Auri, Felurian, Devi, Devi on Magical Steroids whupping somebody's butt (ahem, won't mention any names), Denna, Vashet, Penthe)

(Very important to know how a costume moves and any restrictions it has, as well as all the groovy ooh-la-la it does BEFORE finalizing any choreographies. Much more efficient that way.)

Well, rehearsals for actual dances required separate, distilled playlists—like they do. This way I can more effectively geek out on one character at a time, honing her movements, facial expressions, props, hand gestures, stances, and general flavors that distinguish her from all the other characters.

So I made the playlists. Now I dance to them and I chip away at this project like a sculptor to a massive ledge of raw stone: one costume, one drill session, one experiment, one choreography at a time.⁵

And yet…

Amidst this frenzy of art-nerding and hole-filling, I found myself missing one specific playlist.

The one that had started it all.

There are nights when I need to put this project away. On these nights I need to move solely for myself, dancing the Sounds That Say “Sad” and Mother Smiling. There are nights when I yearn for Wind Turning A Page and Sea of Stars. There are nights when only Dew in the Bracken will do.

Last night was one of them.

RELATED POSTS: Don’t have a clue what I’m talking about with Kvothe the Kingkiller and Name of the Wind?

Or heck, here is the whole Hyperfixator’s Haven Section for all your Kingkiller rabbit-holing.

© 2023 Hartebeast

1. Kintsugi - glueing seams together with veins of gold, thus transforming the broken into the beautiful

2. Patrick Rothfuss’ world of Temerant

The Underthing - hints of the old ruined world

3. The full musical blow-by-blow ridiculata on Spotify

4. The whole photo gallery for this project - costume & makeup trials and lately, my first experiments to figure out how green screen works

5. My Spotify profile - where you can find alllllllllllll my playlists, including the ones for my Elements System, my Persephone & Haides tales, the other novels I write, and some of the other stories/characters I’m obsessed with. We’ll get to those eventually, too. It is knowne.