Live Complexely.

It feels a little like an insumountable task to write about The Complexity of Belonging, to portray what it means to me, to communicate the effect it had on me. But I feel obligated to try, so here goes.

This piece connected with me on a level that I have never experienced before. The mixture of impeccable acting work and stunning choreography and dancing wove together to  create a piece that shook me to the core. It was an extremely important piece of theater, that beside being meaningful to young people in this world, was also visually stunning and used technology in a integrated and mature way. Seeing this piece lit the dancer fire that still live in me. It was incredible, the dancers at Chunky Move are astounding and the fact that I couldn't tell the difference between the actors and the  dancers is so very impressive to me. When most of the time I see actors doing movement or dance there's a part of me that cringes at the lack of technical skills.

I've always believed that complexity is the most important aspect of life and art and understanding. That everything we see around us is inherently more complex than we could ever imagine and that trying to simplify those things is at least a disservice and at most horrendously offensive. And this piece is about just that. Including thoughts on lonliness and togetherness and pain and understanding and love and what women want from oral sex. It's about life, in a beautiful, messy and dangerous, way that doesn't try to answer any questions that seems more honest than any piece of theater I've seen in a long time. And at its very center it evokes feelings and thoughts about the fact that defining yourself by the people around you doesn't work. And that you can learn and learn and learn about the world and meet people and fall in love and make connections but at the end of the day what you really have is yourself. And it wasn't some bullshit lesson about self-love, its about being able to look at yourself complexly. To not force yourself into a box, to, "Look past the broken pieces."

But if I learned one thing from this performance, it was that this is the sort of work I want to do. And I don't have to choose between dance and acting, and that both parts of me can coexist and create something more beautiful and important than they ever could apart.