Running With Wolves in the Woods

Three ACOTAR choreographies begin to take shape

Become the Wolf - by Kirk Lanier

It begins as a spark.

In this case, the spark is a book. A character (or five) with whom I resonate. A story that speaks to the tales of my heart that I long to set into motion. A setting that swirls through my mind, painting it in colors and scents and breezes or storms. A clothing palate that screams, “OMGs I totally have a costume that could suffice!” or “OMGs that would totally give me the excuse to transform those fabrics and that beaded fringe I’ve been storing and lugging around through six different moves and even hauled across the country because it’s so terribly groovy but I just didn’t know what to do with it...”

Dun-dun-dunnnnnnn…

“Until now.”

First comes the music. I mean, we’re talking about dance here, so of course I require the music. But it’s more than that. Because I’m still reading the book. Then the book “ends” but leaves other elements in cliffhanger, which demands that I head to the library to acquire Book 2 and devour it as well. As I’m waiting for whoever has Book 3 checked out ahead of me to finish it, a very generous fiend — I mean, friend…

I use this term loosely, because “friend” barely paints the picture. You story-enabler, you. You gateway-book corruptor. (“It’s just one little book…what???”) You addictive craic-instigator.

You know who you are.

And I adore you for it.

Because this friendly fiend finances my frenetic frenzy of frantic page-flippery. I could use a couple other F-words anywhere in here but I won’t. Yet.

A box-set generously shows up on my doorstep one day, contributing to the addiction. Page-flippery resumes uninterrupted, which only fuels my need for music. More music. Ever more freaking music, aaaaagh!!!

It’s rigoddamdiculous around here.

Hashtag Hyperfixation.

Hashtag Special Interest cherry-picking fodder.

So as I’m taking advantage of my always-sketchy, TBI-laced brain’s ability to read paragraphs consecutively from the top of the page to the bottom…and to comprehend what I just read without having to go back and re-read (too-too much)…to remember what I read and then…drumroll…to still remember what I read upon waking up the next morning…?

As I read, I start dreaming about this story. It infiltrates my waking mind. Since I do not have the capacity to indulge in my latest obsession while washing dishes, or operating a motor vehicle, or taking a shower... (I don’t do well with audio books because I have significant Dain Bramage to the audio-input channel), my mind and reader-heart crave The Soundtrack to tide me over amidst these tasks.

This is not surprising. I’m a dancer and musician, so music is like blood to me. My dreams come equipped with soundtracks. So do my daydreams. Ear-worms are relentless around here. So while I’m in obsession-mode with a book that is destined to become dances?

The soundtrack is a must.

Since none of my book-obsessions over the past decade have been made into TV or movies, I have to create my own makeshift soundtracks. (Even if they were onscreen, I probably would do this anyway.)

Once I start sitting down with the Spotify to corral music into a playlist…

IT STARTS.

THE CHOREOGRAPHIC SEEDS: You asked; I tell.

It almost always attacks me in the kitchen. Occasionally the bathroom as I’m getting into or out of the shower — occasionally even IN the shower — but guaranteed in the kitchen. Sometimes it strikes even before I begin making the playlist. Sometimes I make the playlist as a reaction to being overtaken with the irrefutable urge to dance when a song comes on, when I realize that I’m not just dancing.

I’m dancing this character. This story. With this scenery swirling through my head.

That’s what happened this last time.

About a month ago, the Inciting Incident Song that kicked off this whole project came on as I was making lunch — an innocent sandwich that was destined to be mauled with A Court of Mist and Fury (Book 2) open beside my plate. The song had originally traipsed into my world after another of my dear craic-instigators had introduced me to a new musical-storytelling Muse by sending me a video of her own dance to Winterbird. (“It’s just one little musician…what???”)¹

And down the AURORA rabbit-hole I tumbled — Eeeeeee!

So now, AURORA often comes up on my Spotify. Which means she’s with me here and there and everywhere, in my kitchen and car and bathroom and any other place where I require background music.

On the lunch hour in question, this happened:

Sandwich-stuffery ceased.

Improvisational “Dancing Like the World (and therefore nobody) Is Watching” overtook me. But this time, my head was a-swirl with ACOTAR imagery,² rather than my standard she-wolfy enjoyment of this song, and the vague notion of someday I’d really like to make a dance to this.

In that moment, I knew what was about to happen. After lunch, I started gathering the playlist fodder so I could dance — uninterrupted and to my heart’s content — solely to songs that remind me of this tale.

That’s when I discovered that — yes indeedy, of course — a variety of musicians had created songs specifically inspired by this book series, as well as a boatload of people who have obviously read them all, become as obsessed as I am, and created their own playlists.

Which introduced me to more flippin’ gateway songs.

More musical Muses.

More reasons to dance.

The ridiculata is strong with this one, but we just go with the bombardment of this artistically inspirational tsunami. If we don’t, if we try to fight the waves, distraction happens amidst attempting to accomplish anything else. I mean, that’s a given, but The Muse always knows when IT’S TIME. Thankfully, wisely — mercifully — She struck me on a weekend when I could afford to go down the rabbit hole and when I needed to shut out the world for a little while.

Which I did.

While I was making another lunch that weekend, I put on my new fledgling playlist. It was simply called the ACOTAR Playlist back then, but it would very quickly become the Spring Court Playlist because there was just too much inspirational music for there to Be Only One.

Plus, the sections of these books are so distinctive, and the types of movement, emotion, costuming, and backgrounds whirling in my head were so vastly different that I needed to give each mood/section its own playlist.

Which I did.

But before this mood-segregation happened, it was just…the ACOTAR Playlist. Amidst chopping up lettuce for a salad, the third song came on. Since salads have no time-constraints like other forms of lunch-cookery, The Muse cackled.

Then She tackled.

Right there in the rectangular space of my kitchen, with my stove, counters and cupboards to the fore, with the refrigerator and front hall entrance aft, with the sink on my right and the living room on my left…my house disappeared.

I suddenly stand in the winter woods. I creep through snow. I am no longer sock-footed. My boots make that distinctive snow-crunch sound that boots make in snow that is not the lightest powder. My footsteps are so careful and so precise that the sound is minimal. Sometimes I even pull off a completely silent stalk.

My tiptoe touches down — pauses. Retracts. Extends again, this time in a slightly different spot to prevent the snapping of that branch I felt underfoot.

In every direction, dark tree-skeletons scrape across the grayscale of a snowy hill and the pale winter sky. I peer through the thorns. A deer is stripping bark off a tree and casually chewing. My feet hunker down solid. My body coils. I draw my bow in an instant, and fix my gaze. My arrow aims straight and true. (Really it’s my stiff-straight pointy-finger with all the other fingers curled back. Go with me here. This is dance, not Hulu.)

Being in my kitchen at lunchtime during a Hyperfixator Dive means I am hungry. That only adds sharp teeth to this inspiration, because at the opening of Book 1, Feyre is hungry.

Way hungrier than I am. Like…way, WAY hungrier, and that deer is potentially life-or-death for not only her, but her two sisters and her lame father.

But somebody else is stalking that deer.

A gigantic, furry, fanged, clawed, yellow-eyed somebody. Somebody that shouldn’t be in my piddly, barren, human woods. Somebody way too big to be a normal wolf.

And he is hunting my dinner.

Fucker.

Can you see me there in my kitchen? If you know my dancing, you know that I have this thing with bow-and-arrow.

Duh. Sagittarius.

So here I am, aiming my bow-and-arrow (my extended fist and my drawn-back pointy finger) at my deer (the left corner of the counter, next to the toaster). I’m dressed in my Harley Quinn fuzzy pants, my gray fuzzy socks, and my big Yoda BJJ sweatshirt, but in truth, I’m wearing a ratty cloak and ratty boots, and I’m freezing my arse off as my gaze darts back and forth between the wolf and the deer.

Wolf…

Deer…

Wolf…deer…wolf—

He’s preparing to spring on my dinner. He’ll shred it into a mess of inedible guts, blood, bones and gristle across the snow. Alas, I am not a carrion-eater. My eldest sister Nesta might be, but I am not and neither is Elaine, so I push a silent cloud of air out my frosted snot-tunnels as I release tension on the bow and lower it.

I shift my stance with as little sound and as little motion as humanly possible.

My hand carefully, quietly — so very surreptitiously — replaces the piddly arrow I had nocked. Instead, I draw out that special ash arrow that some rando once told me can kill a Faerie, because that’s what this wolf is. It’s a rapacious magical creature that should be confined across the magical wall that prevents rapacious magical assholes from stalking my woods and hunting my dinner.

And especially from hunting ME as dinner — piddly human that I am.

I don’t want to be dinner any more than I want to go home without any dinner, so I sneakily slide the big-ass ash arrow out of my quiver and I take aim. I have no idea if this is going to work or not. I could just piss the thing off and then I’m dead.

So maybe I’ll let it steal my dinner, after all, and go home empty-handed. We’ll all be empty-bellied for another night, but that would leave me capable of exiting these woods alive. (Hopefully.) Maybe I’ll wait for the thing to quit munching on my dinner, sneak home, shiver in my rat-ass bed with two hungry, pissed off sisters, and return for another try tomorrow.

Or maybe I won’t.

Because by then I’ll be even shakier and weaker than I am at this moment, which means I’ll be less likely to be able to hit what I’m aiming at.

IF I even see anything tomorrow.

Not a lot of dinner in these woods lately except…you know.

Me.

My gaze lands back on the wolf. My heart is hammering. My lips peel back to reveal my teeth, and I swear they’re a bit fanged, too. My bow and arrow have sagged during my moment of hesitancy and doubt, so I take aim again.

Now the big-ass ash arrow (my stiff-straight middle, ring, and pinky fingers) are pointed at the big-ass wolf (my big-ass blender named Ninja). I am ninja-silent as I draw in one breath and make my decision.

I’ll let the music tell you what I decided there in my kitchen that really wasn’t a kitchen at all.

The piddly regular ole arrow I’ve been using all day…vs. the big-ass ash arrow as twilight descends upon the old life.

For a week straight, songs bombard me. Other dances inspired by other memorable moments from these books perform their own similar renditions in my kitchen. In the bathroom. In my dance studio. In mah head as I’m trying to fall asleep, which forces me to reach for my phone and shoot myself a quick text so I don’t forget by the time I wake up.

A few costumes start calling my name so I hunt down the scenes in the books to ensure that what I remember is accurate and that, yes indeedy, I really do have something that would work. If you know these books, you can probably guess which one poked me first.

Duh, the Starfall Gown.

(I only need to repair/redo the shoulder straps of my snow-faerie encrusted bra, and make Feyre’s diamond cuffs to match. Otherwise, yeah, I got this.)

In the meanwhile, I tear through the remainder of Books 3 and dive into the novella.

Then the Muse makes another demand: it’s time to lay out the foamy puzzle-mats in their obnoxious, green-screen glory. During my spring cleaning, I’d considered taking down the green-screen backdrop and rearranging my studio furniture back into a pretty living space. I mean, it’s only been 22 months that the ugly black frame and some backdrop curtain or other has been folded-and-hung on the far right edge, or stretched across my patio windows during filming.

I decide against taking it down, because my body is at a glorious point where I can begin rebuilding all that lost flexibility and strength from the year of government-bombardment and neuro-crashes, as well as the eight pounds of muscle mass that Covid devoured in five days like a big-ass, fanged, magical creature feasting on my flesh.

Stole 1/3 of my hair, too.

Fucker.

(See, all this stuff is artistic fodder, yo. Use it!)

When battling back from a health crisis as well as battling the daily ravages of chronic health issues, one must eliminate as many obstacles as possible between the impetus to drag one’s sedentary arse off the comfy cushions versus Doing The Project.³

Therefore, the green-screen backdrop remains. The green-screen floor is now placed so I can simultaneously rebuild dance-chops at the same time as continuing that interrupted project from last summer: learning how to friggin’ dance on squishy, grippy foam mats instead of my hard, stable, slide-able carpet.

The correct amount of grip vs. slide: CRUCIAL for dance, and especially for preventing a re-torn meniscus amidst dance.

So now I have the music. It’s in the right order to remind me of this character’s mindsets and movements during each dance. The rehearsal space is set up. Choreographic seeds are already germinating for a number of pieces.

They want to take form. Really badly. They want me to take notes about them and start memorizing them so I can film them.

Only one problem. (Okay, there are a bunch of logistical problems, which we’ll cover later, but there is one problem I have to deal with before any of the others.)

I don’t dare start setting choreographies unless I know:

• What I’ll be wearing on my feet.

• If I’ll have sleeve-drapes flinging into my eyes.

• If my midriff will be bare or covered.

• If I’ll be in a streamlined outfit fitted to my hips and torso, or if any hip moves and torso isolations would be hidden beneath thick layers of skirting or coats.

• What kind of stance I’ll be capable of pulling off due to the range of motion in what my legs are wearing.

• Am I hobbled in a tight skirt?

• Am I encumbered by tons of weighty skirt layers?

• Am I in pants?

• Are they tight around my hips?

• Flexible material? Or stiff, so therefore they would bind in any kicks or floorwork?

• Am I in Night Court pants for this scene? These suckers are billowy around the lower leg, which means I have to take a lot of care in my choreographies not to catch my feet in them and thus kill myself off by face-planting straight into the corner of the end table at the edge of my filming space.

I mean, there’s immersing yourself into the circumstances of the character you’re trying to understand and embody, and I know, I know. Feyre is constantly at risk of dying, but sheesh! Actually risking life and limb? That’s a little far, even for me — obsessive, rabbit-holing fuck that I am.

Thus do I need to know what I’m wearing before I can truly and fully start setting these choreographies.

Because we do not waste time by knowingly creating a choreography that might have to be completely or even partially redone once I realize that I can’t do it in the chosen costume, or that the moves I’ve been practicing will be obscured from view in what I want to wear.

And that…?

Whuff. Acquiring that knowledge requires a completely different rabbit-hole.

The Costume Closet Frolic.

Only once I know what I’m wearing can I begin setting all these dance seeds into into choreographic notes and start rehearsing.

Shabby huntress in human woods, sans shabby cloak. Pretty-in-pink Spring Court--you can't make me wear a dress! And of course, the She-Wolf costume with legs in bow-and-arrow stance by Kirk Lanier.

At the moment, The Wolf In the Woods, A Life For A Life, and Running With the Wolves⁴ are (preliminarily) costumed, and they have their first choreographic draft puked out. These things are not remotely set in stone. They’re just…sketches. I once modeled regularly for a painting class. The instructor called them “gestures.”

The completed dances might turn out a lot like these first drafts, just filled in with intricate details. But then again, when I truly start moving to this music, I might find that I’ve gotten it all wrong.

So many other influences stand between me and the final product. Influences like:

• Acquiring a deeper understanding of the lyrics as I work to memorize them.

• My body’s willingness or unwillingness to do what I envision.

• An interpersonal incident that shifts my emotional landscape and what I’m feeling called to express through movement.

• Or something as simple as blogging about these dances, nabbing the YouTube videos to share with you, and seeing the music video of my chosen song for the first time.

Until today, I’ve only ever listened to Running With the Wolves on Spotify. So now I have another artist’s story, thematic imagery, landscape, and costuming contributing to the overall flavor of this piece.

It will all swirl inside me.

• Feyre’s tale.

• My own.

• AURORA’s.

• The influences from the conversations I’ve been having about these books with my friends.

• The things I read about them online.

• Other fan art.

It’s all fodder.

It’s all paint on the palette.

It’s all a variety of arrows in my quiver.

Now that I’ve heard the rustle in the brush and spied my quarry, I’m sneaking toward it. Carefully. I’m choosing the correct size arrow, drawing back the bow, and adjusting my aim. Before we know it, if nothing comes along to interrupt me and steal my dinner again (fucker), I’ll fire.

At that point, I will no longer be the hunter. I will become the arrow.

But this arrow is a shape-shifter. Sometimes I will blaze across the sky like a shooting star. Other times, I’ll be low to the ground, shifty and maneuverable, hunkered down with powerful haunches. I’ll be clawed and fanged with both fur and scales, and I’ll be…

1. “It’s just one little musician…” - Valentina’s dance to Winterbird by AURORA

2. “It’s just one little book…okay fine, one little book series…” - A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

3. Getting unstuck from the muck when I Hashtag Don’t Wanna

4. The Dancing Feyre Playlist so I can tinker with potential dances, uninterrupted by all the fabulous mood-music songs in between them. The first two songs on this list will be video montages once I shoot all the footage. Taylor Ash’s ACOTAR will cover the overall story, and Twilight Huntress will cover Feyre’s transition from Shabby Human Huntress to…what she becomes.