this is combat chameleons: a monthly newsletter of my most intimate thoughts that came about while listening to certain songs and that will graciously lend themselves as material for creating short movement studies. in this way, i hope to document, in part, my own personal creative process. i also hope to use this newsletter as a safe space for me to process life lived thus far. my hope is that this will not only serve as a kind of motivation for me, but also for you. creating is a lifelong, messy, wonderfully chaotic thing. let’s not be entirely alone while in the midst of it.
think of this new endeavor as research. i know i do. the act of approaching my work i.e. choreography and writing has revolved, i’ve been realizing, on this axis of research. this frame of mind invites in so much curiosity, hope, and wonder to our work. we artists are researchers of many a thing. i am a researcher of how the wide range of human emotions live in our minds, which is arguably the essence of our human experience, for that will then determine how they exist, internally and externally, on and in our bodies. i myself am my own treasured and invaluable subject. how would our work change or perhaps remain the same (though can anything really remain the same?) if we approach ourselves and our muses of inspiration as research? the science of creativity.
many of these songs that i will introduce in this newsletter exist or have existed on loop in my mind. i have some of my greatest self-discoveries and movement ideas while listening to music. i wanted to try and capture it. i wanted to write and listen, listen and write. i know so many other humans understand this beautiful relationship to music and thinking. i hope i find you. i hope to hear your thoughts on and to music.
for the first month, we will explore adrienne lenker’s music. i thought it fitting to start off with the song that inspired the title of this newsletter: indiana by adrianne lenker. here we go. for real this time.
i remember when this song fit perfectly into the then-confusing grooves of my life. i was living out of a suitcase, bouncing around los angeles, california. i had just turned twenty-four and i was meeting different kinds of people for what felt like the first time ever, although i had been in college. i had just graduated with my bachelor’s from riverside, california. there were tons of people there. a beautiful mess of faces, minds, and feelings. but this was different. that had felt safe, albeit unbeknownst to me at the time. this could be dangerous. people were older and bolder and newer and braver. i felt out of place. i felt young and naive and innocent. and everyone knew it. the pressure and melancholy from graduating college at the start of a pandemic also left me with a lonely weight on my shoulders. questions of who and what i was supposed to be and become were, and at times still are, constantly racing through my mind. oh how my heart was beatin’, about ready to explode.
i fell straight into a friend group that consisted of people at least ten years older than me. i met beautiful souls, tortured relationships, and hurt people that resorted to indifference as a way to deal with whatever pain they were running from. there was a girl who loved me. there was a man who loved her. there was money and drugs. i tried cocaine for my first time, and my last. they all lived off insta cart and bottle service, and they let me join and watch them. i observed their lives, their interactions, and at once felt immensely distant from them and no different than them. it terrified me and comforted me. the dust inside the rusted souls. i was teetering, as i always had and always will, on a thin line of contradictions within the self and the world around me. existing, i began to wonder, is everything all at once. it is never one thing, as we are never one thing. nature as a reflection of what we are had finally began to make sense to me.
i danced to this song by lenker one chilly, lonely weekend evening on the brick patio of their twenty five thousand dollar apartment. my phone was propped on their outdoor washer machine and i let my back drag me down while my arms tried to keep it all lifted high. one shot honey, collect it all. lenker’s lyrical poetry became words of refuge for me in a space and in a time where fear was running my nervous system. how could i let this fear run rampantly controlled in specific parts of the body? what parts of my body hold fear? it was my neck, my lower back, my shoulders, my chest. you should get a ride cause you can’t control the heart that beats under the bone. parts that were vulnerable and hard for me to see with my own eyes. parts that were vulnerable for others to attack, to take advantage of. how can self-defense become beautiful? should it?
this song became a home that night. i felt safe, taken care of. there was a deepness that i had been lacking in this superficial way of living i had become witness of. to become a witness of. this state of observation returns to me again and again. it has been a reality for me before and it was again during this time. this deepness felt like an extension of the warm, sensitive soul i had lived with my whole life. i knew this part of me well. and so, i danced. one shot honey, collect it all.
balance on the head. push away from the thick air. succumb to the pressure. let the back pull me down. where do i begin to make a choice? and the war’s been a long time coming, yes a long long war’s gonna come.
in this unlearning of sorts, my mind felt clearer. it took just a moment to myself to process this change through movement. this finally allowed me to breathe for the first time in months. why do i take so long to do the things that are good for me? how can i spend so much energy doubting myself without ever even trying? why does that feel comfortable for me? you’re entertaining the talk that is told through the teeth of the mouths of the millions dyin’ to meet ya. it can take us days, months, years to give ourselves that space + time to process. don’t worry, that is okay. we must balance our self-accountability with radical self-compassion. i’d argue to continue questioning that which blocks us from unleashing the self-love swimming around in us.
it was cold that night, yet my body was hot from the heat of the movement. a few weeks later, i left. i left that small, suffocating world of wealth and pain. i left in doses. i returned less and less, until i never came back. we’re standing at the end of a story, at the foot of a palindrome. i lost touch with many of them. i look back on that time now with gratitude, as we tend to do when the hardest parts are over. i found gratitude and respect for myself. this was not the first time in life i had to quickly learn what i wanted to be and what i did not want to be. but, it was one of the first times i trusted myself enough to do it. and i have become and will continue to become what i have chosen to value the most. through it all, the most consistent pattern i had was lifting myself out of the mire of insecurity and loss that had enveloped me. you will persevere somehow, i promise you.
come on my combat chameleon, give it up, you’ve got your life to attend to buttercup.
i created yet another quiet, resilient joy. here’s to you creating the same.