Lovely: A Dance With Roses (and thorns)
Mapping an ACOTAR dance that makes me bleed music & emotion
It starts with a song.
No. It doesn’t. It’s actually a feeling. A whole big, complicated rat’s nest of feelings that can only be fully expressed through the movements of my body and the the expressions on my face.
Contortion.
Bliss.
Longing.
Agony.
It’s the scent of the most fragrant roses.
Rotting.
It’s the sensation of the softest petals, trailed down my skin. The caress of that rose bud, just on the verge of blossoming. It begins at my cheek, traces down my throat, makes a few heavenly (torturous) circles before continuing south. Further. Further. Further until it drops off the tips of my toes and I realize as I sit bolt-upright that I am alone in this bed.
And I really always was.
It’s the stain of that supersaturated hue. Is it scarlet? Crimson? Maroon? Race car red?
No.
It’s the color of blood.
I have a glorious pair of red roses for my hair. In fact I have many red roses, in a number of sizes. The ones I’m thinking of are the biggest ones. Great sprawling blossoms at the height of their openness. You know, that place where they’re so open that the only place the petals can go from there is
DOWN.
The hair adornments attached to these roses have thick dangles of red yarn. When I’ve got them on my head, they hang down to my hips. When I’ve got them on my hips, I’m likely to step on them if I’m not careful.
The costuming image flashes.
Me in something…I don’t know. White? Fleshy hued? Something pale and pretty black and bold, with those roses pinned at my hips. This is nothing new — wearing these hair adornments on my dance belts.
But the image is.
I have them pinned just above my hipbones, flowers prominent, yarn cascading down my thighs. My hands lower. I trace circles around the blooms to call your attention to them. Then my fingertips spear and dive beneath the dangles, twining around them like twin serpents. Upon arising, all those blood-hues drip down my pale forearms.
I didn’t mean to cut myself.
But sometimes I do.
Sometimes I slice myself open and I break my heart on you. Sometimes you break it. Sometimes you mean to, and you sneer as I bleed. And so.
I dance.
The sharp hits of this music thud into my bones as hard as they pierce through to the depths of me. It’s the slice of the dagger going in, and it’s the hammer of the fist behind it, slamming it in to the hilt. It’s the blow itself, and it’s the fallout of everything crashing down in its wake.
I could never choreograph this piece. It’s too raw to be restrained like that. It needs my heart and my steaming guts fully engaged in the moment with the music, rather than the intricacies of my mind burning up gears as I try to remember “what comes next?”
As such, I can only give unhindered expression to this feeling by designing a general movement theory:
At such-and-such point in the music, the fists will land. One…
And then the other.
When they hit the gut or the chest, the torso will cave.
Other times, the heart will be thrown open. Ripe for the next gutting.
After the first strike, there will never be a moment when at least one blade is not embedded. In order to free a hand, the other fist must drive in. Slice across. Tear open. Eviscerate me.
Because it did.
Sometimes it still does.
But then the chorus comes. Ethereal. Almost whimsied. Not quite bliss.
The left hand floats.
Descends.
Rises.
Speaks.
Not the right hand. No matter what is going on all around me, that stays where it is, with that knife buried between my ribs.
Gouging.
Life goes on. Another verse, another shimmy section. Broken pieces are picked up and put back together. Yet that fist never unclenches. I try to. I really do. I even pry at my fingers to make them open so I can finally release it.
🎶 Let it goooo, let it goooo—
NO.
It is too precious. This love and the loss and the pain and the hope. It is too dear to me and it is still too new, too raw, too important, so my fist slams shut around it. I cradle it to my heart where it belongs.
I dance this over and over and over.
First for myself, to give fully embodied voice to that hemorrhaging wound. And that other one. This other one, too.
Second, it allows me to practice gently opening my fingers, even if they keep slamming back shut.
Third, I’m memorizing the music so I can dance to it in a structured improvisation, yet hit every single nuance in its crucial millisecond.
Fourth…
I’m polishing this stone.
This dance is way too much heart and dreamy eyes and breath and blood for choreography. The more I practice it, the more polished my in-the-moment expression becomes. To help this along, I create more movement theories and set the markers for each section.
Verse 1: shimmy, wield roses like candles in palms.
Fisted dagger section 1.
Chorus 1: R fist in heart, left expressing the lyrics. (I memorize those. Singing along helps ingrain them. This little section is choreographed. But the rest…)
Verse 2: back to shimmying, more pretty arms but the R fist remains clenched until it drives back into my heart.
And so on…
There is an instrumental section after the second chorus where, if I’d been making this dance for stage, I would have had to figure out what to do with those roses. I would have had to take the time after wielding them in my palms to affix them to my hips mid-dance, in order to get the effect that I imagine. Or I would have had to wear them on my hips and wield different roses in my palms.
With video, I don’t have to. We can haz it allllll, Precious! I can cut the shot straight from holding them in my palms to — voila!
Movie magic: they appear on my hips.
Or I can have them symbolically lying on the ground throughout the dance. Or not. Whatever I decide. I like simplicity and they are very pretty. They accentuate my hip movements and my torso’s shape, so I’ll probably hook them onto my belt as soon as I’m done playing with them as though they’re candles in my palms.
But you just never know about me. It might get to the day of filming and I might not. That’s one of the many nifty things about telling these types of tales on video instead of stage.
I know, I know, there’s nothing like seeing me live.
There isn’t.
But that isn’t much of an option these days. So I make up for it with all the nifty stuff I can do on video that I can’t in a live show. Bonus: on the screen, you’ll always get a front row seat. Sometimes I’ll be so close that you would swear you could reach out and touch me.
If I’d let you.
Please don’t.
This particular cut is too raw and too tender to bear anybody else touching it. Besides, with the violence of how hard those daggers hit, if you were close enough to touch me, I might whirl around, completely in-the-moment of the music. Unaware that you’re standing there, I might accidentally smash my fist across your face as I spin, and that is the last thing I’d ever want to do. I might unintentionally drive that dagger into your heart, too.
Maybe you already have one (or a few) in there. So maybe this dance will pain you to watch. Or maybe it won’t.
It pains me to dance it, but it’s that cathartic type of pain. This is why we start out doing this dance in solitude. Nobody in the blast radius. Nobody to have a single opinion about it, or to need something from me when it breaks me down. Breaks me apart. Apparently there’s a lot to squeeze out from these wounds, because I have been dancing this song for years.
Did you notice that I didn’t say “dancing TO this song”?
More like it dances me.
For the whole summer after I discovered this song, I collected movement theories and smoothed out rough spots, in anticipation of turning it into a dance. But it never became anything. The timing wasn’t right. I couldn’t picture what I was wearing. I couldn’t picture the precise story, the character, the setting, so eventually it faded.
Here and there, I came back to it. I’d run across the song on a soundtrack and get struck by the urge to move. Or something would call it to mind and I’d put it on. It annoyed me, how many times I had to run through the piece to remember the movement theories I’d come up with before.
I was even more annoyed that I hadn’t written those theories down on a choreography sheet.
Obviously not annoyed enough, because I never did write them down.
Until now.
What changed? After so many years trying to figure out this song, the ACOTAR project struck me. There are a boatload of dances like this one that I’ve been tinkering with for years but that have never made themselves fully known — who they are and what they’re really wanting to say.
But these roses.
Those bloody streams hanging off them.
The thorns on their stems, tearing me to pieces, skin to bone…
One afternoon, the image slammed into my mind so I hunted through my computer, just to see if I had been a smart-girl and written down any notes the last time I’d dinked around with it.
Nope.
Dork.
That’s okay. It’s all come back and then some, the more I’ve played with it. Sections and phrases that had always remained elusive have also been filled in. The costume came clear. The purpose and character and story and location popped up to say, “Ooh! Ooh! Pick me!”
So I did.
Slight ACOTAR spoilers ahoy!
The DanceStory
Feyre. Still human. Before she’s transformed into a Fae like the ones all around her. She’s been obsessively painting for days, ever since Tamlin gave her the colors and the canvas and the place in which to create. But today, out of nowhere, she just cannot put dripping brush to canvas. Amidst gnashing her teeth, she realizes that she’s been painting over her grief and loss and anger with all these colors.
Not the deeper things of what she feels.
She’s been painting over all that with the joy of finally getting to do her favorite thing in the world to her heart’s content.
She’s been burying it under her growing wonder with this magical land she’s been forced to dwell in, and with the gradual appreciation — dare she say, blossoming love? — for this strange, scary faerietale creature with whom she lives.
Beauty warms to Beast.
But today, it hits her. Her family didn’t lift one friggin’ finger to stop him from taking her away.
Nobody protested.
Nobody spoke up to try to get her out of it.
For sure nobody volunteered to take her place. She probably wouldn’t have let them, but still.
In fact, nobody seemed terribly cut up when The Beast collared her and marched her into a land known for being lethal to humans. We will glimpse flashes of this moment, because there will be an earlier dance in a very different costume from these blood-red flowers she wears in a rose garden in the land of Eternal Spring.
Back then, she put on boots. Cloak. Heavy winter wear. Even heavier armor around her heart as she is delivered into the claws of the enemy without so much as the gnashing of teeth or a teary eye from the people she loves. No echo of weeping in her wake. No wailing and railing. Certainly no bailing her out.
Just like there had been no bailing her out after her mother died and her father lost everything. They had all let the youngest daughter pick up the entire burden and carry it alone since she was fourteen.
And tonight that guts her.
It pisses her off.
It grieves her.
But they’re her family, so she bleeds.
I bleed with her. Through her. Or…she bleeds through me. Hers are not the precise types of wounds that gut me, piss me off, grieve me. Hers are not the losses and betrayals that make me bleed.
Doesn’t matter.
That’s the cool thing about art.
We become One for a moment — me and outraged Feyre in Tamlin’s moonlit rose garden with her paint brushes shoved aside. We become One, with that flower tucked behind an ear, holding blood-red blooms that twine around wrists and refuse to let go.
MORE ABOUT THIS DANCE:
The series of books that inspired a series of dances:
The things I’ve been writing on my NSFW publication have also helped me find the imagery for this dance at long last. This is not the only story that gouges today’s thorns into my flesh. But it’s one of them. It’s all artistic fodder. It’s all paint dripping down the canvas. Beware - there be Beasties over yonder! That’s why it’s on Bella & the Beast, instead of here on Tinkerings, even though it’s about how I discovered belly dancing. I should say, it’s how my discovery of belly dancing saved my life when I was nineteen.
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