Aviva Jaye Dreams of Chaos
“Show business” is one thing, but creativity is everywhere all the time and people are magnificent.
Dreams of Chaos is a series of Q&As with folks about how they engage with chaos in their work. Maybe they love the chaos and use it as an engine for creativity. Maybe they struggle with the indefinite and are trying to wrangle it however they can. If you like this interview, please consider sharing it with others or tapping the little heart symbol — it really helps the words find other likeminded people. Thanks!
Now, let’s dive in, shall we?
Have you ever met someone and known, right at the first moment, that you’re in the presence of a very special soul? Not to sound too much like a hippie, but it’s an energy thing. Some folks emanate goodness, thoughtfulness, kindness, and you can feel it humming around them.
That’s what I felt when I first met Aviva Jaye, at a concert featuring women musicians of Brooklyn. I was there to support my wife, who was playing a song as part of the concert, but when Aviva began playing, and then singing, I was hypnotized. The phrase ‘spiritual experience’ gets thrown around a lot these days, but that’s how that evening was. I actually wrote a spontaneous napkin poem as I was listening — maybe I’ll dig it up and share it with the Chaos Palace readers at some point.
Throughout my subsequent years in Brooklyn, Aviva and I traveled in similar circles. We never really got to spend too much time together, much to my chagrin, because life kept getting in the way. Tours, and travels, and projects and all the hectic rumble-tumble that comes with a life in New York City straight outta college.
Whenever our paths crossed, though, that same sense of inherent thoughtful-kindness remained present. When you read her answers, you’ll get it. A day when you run into Aviva is a good day.
As I’m writing these words, the world is literally on fire. My dear friends have fled their home in Los Angeles. Last night, I spoke to my neighbor — an older gay woman who moved here from Ireland for more civil rights — and she shared her fears of the incoming administration. Fears I very much share. Earlier yesterday, I spoke to folks back home in Israel about the frustration, and rage, and despair they feel when they see where things are headed1.
It’s easy to lose ourselves in the anxiety and helplessness. Instead, may I recommend reading this interview? Every one of these answers was something I needed to hear. There are good people in the world. Wise people. Kind people. And here’s one of them.
Meet Aviva Jaye and her dreams of chaos.
How would you describe yourself and the work you do?
In a nutshell, I am a multidisciplinary artist/performer, primarily a musician (vocalist, instruments, composing, songwriting) but with a foot in theatre and dance as well. I also have a background in educational support, both as a longtime tutor, teaching artist, and administrator for education and arts nonprofits and in the context of private creative businesses.
Where are you from? Where have you lived? Where do you live now? How do you feel about moving around vs staying static?
I grew up in Illinois, about 30 minutes on the Illinois side of St. Louis, Missouri. My family are from Chicago and East St. Louis, Illinois. I moved to Chicago in my late teens and lived there through college and a couple years after undergrad, until I moved to Brooklyn in 2009.
I’ve been in Brooklyn for coming on 16 years, but last year I started splitting my time and spending part of my time in Chicago. It was a hefty decision, but after years of allowing work and the unpredictable possibility of being called for work as freelancer lead my setup and schedule, I fulfilled my goal of living alone in my own apartment. Which I can do in Chicago but not in NYC (as of yet), in order to support my mental health, sense of productivity, and overall wellness. I’m still part of a lovely household in Bed-Stuy with others as well.
When I think about moving around vs staying static, I tend to keep thinking and daydreaming and next thing you know it’s been an hour, hahaha! I’ve always been interested in seeing new places, immersing and connecting with them and the folks there, but I’ve also always been a fan of my connections and relationships and keeping them nurtured. While staying static doesn’t appeal to me, being rooted does. I’ve had the fortune of learning how to do that even as my work takes me different places, on different tours, with different amazing people known and new to me, and (it must be said) away from the people I care most deeply about or want to spend time with most often at times.
I’ve been navigating my emotional landscape around the realities of it, and what keeps me going, besides the beauty of what I get to do, is that true connections can be nurtured and expanded across distance and time. I lean upon that truth daily and try to be a good steward of it.
Can you share about how your path led you to the work you do today?
I loved singing and dancing and stories as a kid. I loved the old movie musicals my mom put on and the Motown and jazz vinyl records my parents played in the house. I’d make up little harmonies and little dances and just have fun. My mom took notice, so she started me out in piano lessons. We didn’t even own a keyboard yet, I just practiced my fingerings on a diagram drawn on cardboard until we got one!
I took to learning music (reading, by ear, all of it) like a fish to water and just kept going with singing, additional instruments, and eventually songwriting. Dance, poetry, and eventually drama/acting were a part of the picture, too. I believe the main thing that led me to the work I do today is keeping different aspects of these things incorporated. My degree is in vocal performance, but even when people were telling me that I would eventually have to pick something, one thing, and do that thing six hours a day to master it and nothing else, I didn’t share that conviction.
I had a hunch that staying diversified in what I can do and develop would allow me to work in this way, and it has. Most of the time when someone calls me or recommends me for a job, it is because they can get a two for one or more. I am really grateful that I haven’t given up. Letting something go when it is wise is a great idea, but pushing forth is a vital habit in this field. I’m glad to keep nurturing that habit.
Where do you look for inspiration when you’re feeling tapped out?
I am so introspective. I can spend over an hour sitting and thinking, and another hour journaling. Well, I could if the schedule allowed, ha! I also love life! It’s so dynamic and chock-full of beauty, humor, and meaning, and I really feel that coursing through me. So, when I’m feeling tapped out I like to do a combination of carving out extra time for self-inquiry and reflection and longer free-writing.
I also like to take in art and literature, do longer dance and yoga workouts, take longer walks. I’m a bookworm and reading has saved my life many times over. It never ever shrinks my empathy, which I appreciate about it. A good book — nonfiction, fiction, short stories, etc. — really fuels the inspiration tank. Seeing other performances can be like a geyser of inspiration for me sometimes. Mostly, having great conversations with someone or getting to witness someone being amazing, hilarious, fully themselves, vulnerable, and brilliant is the biggest inspiration for me. This can be in-person or online.
What gets you up in the morning (spiritually, physically, and otherwise)?
What a question, Mikhal! Having the opportunity to do a range of things and live a range of ways gets me up. Frankly speaking, I think about the alternative for me personally — choosing not to use any of my skills, isolating myself from the people I’m connected with, opting out of witnessing the breadth of strength, nuance and beauty, saying no to the challenges that expand who I am in the world — and boom, I’m like, no thanks. That gets me up in the morning.
I consider myself lucky that I can function (usually) on that type of motivation; it’s not lost on me that accessing it is not a given. Some mornings are easier than others, of course, but I definitely feel a sense of use it or lose it, and share it. I’ve been known to say I’m trying not to be dead weight in the world. But also, some days, living is actually just a blast.
What’s something surprising you’ve done or learned that’s changed how you show up in the world?
For the longest time the idea of impermanence and things ending (before I wish for them to) was a serious pain point for me. My anxiety and fear around it got in the way of being present or accepting certain opportunities. After lots of internal work (with support) over several years, I now recognize the reality of change and impermanence as a source of groundedness and even peace for me. I NEVER thought that would be possible.
Now I can look up at a night sky, think about what a little blip we are in space-time, and genuinely exhale and smile. I can give more in all types of relationships because I’m not too anxious about asking something unrealistic in terms of constancy from them. I can recover from tour and all the people I met and may never meet again more quickly, without as much anguish — if any. I can revel in the ability and strength of others and myself to adapt, transmute, adjust, grow and expand and find that beautiful without always waiting for the hammer of heartbreak to crash down on my mind. I still want certain things to last a long time and certainly I still experience deep grief and loss. But there is an underlying, bedrock type of peace that a younger version of me never thought I would be strong enough to accept, cultivate or find. I’m grateful.
What’s something you wish you could engage in more? Why?
This feels vulnerable to say, but I wish I could engage more with my communities on social media. Across time, my relationship with socials has, for the most part, been meaningful, emboldening, helpful, illuminating and just plain entertaining… not only those things, but thank goodness those things! A little over a year ago I made a mindful shift in my relationship to it, and while it’s been healthy for me, I didn’t expect the shift to become indefinite. I’m reckoning with that.
Even as it will shift again, there’s something about this last shift that feels like a one-way, one-lane tunnel out of which I’ve exited on the other side, and there’s no turning the car around. The wishing is probably braided in with some micro-grief I’m still processing around it. I’d like to engage more again because I love the barriers it break: cost, accessibility, geography, time zones. It can allow some serious connectivity, community and creativity to happen. There are experiences related to career, interpersonal, and health I wouldn’t have been able to afford to have by this point in life if they had not been supported by the existence of social media! So, while I refuse to give in to any pre-existing scripts about how to be online, even as an artist/performer/‘brand’, and I feel more connected daily to a sense of liberation as result, I do hope my engagement can increase at some point in a healthy way.
How has your creative work informed the way you think about the world and vice versa?
Creative work reminds me how to be a fully-fledged human and how to see others that way, too. “Show business” is one thing, but creativity is everywhere all the time and people are magnificent. I love being reminded that I’m no better than anybody else and having the space to explore the details, the nuance, the non-black-and-whiteness of the world. There’s so much patience, diligence, discipline, and critical listening that’s required for me to not just be decent at my work but offer something valuable and, I dare say, magical whenever possible with it. Those are part of my value system outside of my creative work.
The world is… well, relentless, so of course it informs my creative work. I am tempted to shrink and lose my sense of bravery more often than I care to admit, but my sense of justice and my personality of emanation supersede the fears on the whole. I have to actively nurture that, and that, too, is creative work.
Here at the Chaos Palace, we’re exploring how inviting messiness into our lives can be a vehicle for curiosity and creativity. How does chaos inform what you do, if at all?
Yes! Chaos is a core component of the universe, why fight it? That said, chaos informs so much of what I do, allowing it to have space in art making, in the music, in the story arc, etc. Music works for me because there are limitations, but accidents become happy and repeated, and stories take shape on their own. Most of my creative work is collaborative so now we’re talking about multiple people with multiple wills, stories, agendas, talents, and nuances. That kind of collaboration is a type of mirror of the cosmic chaos, in my opinion. There’s order and surrender — I think surrender is an art to be practiced, as well as organization.
I live a life of unpredictability. The work I’m doing this month, I won’t be doing next month. That project is ending. I can’t predict when I’ll write another song good enough to go on an album. My income is not static all months of the year, which affects what I’m buying to cook with, when to stay home and when to go out, when I can save and when I cannot, and much more. That is all unpredictability, so honestly I try to keep my relationship to small-scale chaos to a minimum or channeled into creative endeavors, for fun or for work. Cosmic-scale chaos has got it covered =)
Still, my relationship to surrender is constant, and knowing that tidy periods are followed my messy ones and famines are followed by feasts allows me to keep my head. When I’m having a hard time not freaking out, I get a little nerdy and revisit growth patterns in nature or cycles in the solar system or boil some pasta and skim the starchy mess off the top and think how it all rose to the surface before I could get to the good stuff, and I can calm down.
How does chaos inform your non-work life?
Life is messy, and for me, remembering that keeps me from denying parts of others and myself. Like I just mentioned, I do my best to divest from chaos unnecessarily —mostly in the form of avoiding over-engaging with it especially in interpersonal relationships. I continue to work on keeping the flow of compassion and support present while strengthening healthy boundaries. For me, it’s important to know the difference between being steadfast and supportive when shit hits the fan and enabling or choosing to be audience to an excessive relationship to chaos and mess. I have a low threshold for unchecked, unexamined chaos. Let’s stumble forward together; we don’t have to be ballerinas, but may we be self-aware, trying and doing what we can to minimize our harm footprint in the process. That’s my wish.
When does messiness feel like it’s too much? What do you do to rein it in when necessary?
Honestly, it feels like too much right now on a world scale. All I can say right now is I try to tell myself stories that are true and delete the myths. I’m also trying to resist the temptation to rush, rush myself to have more energy, rush to be more useful right this second, rush to have a different set of emotions, rush to need less time to rest.
Sometimes, I have to put in my planner to take extra time to rest or reflect when messiness feels like it’s too much. I do not like to let mess fester… I don’t like piles of unwashed dishes, I don’t like unaddressed, unresolved conflicts, I don’t like being left on read indefinitely =) But, if I’m honest, I don’t get worked up over that category of mess much. It’s usually large scale, society-sized messiness that feels like it’s too much for me. Reminding myself that I am but one person in a collective helps me rein it in.
I am also dedicated to breaking the generational pattern of Black women being overworked, under-appreciated, their literal bodies and labor used for the profits of others at their expense and their health and right to joy ignored systemically. That informs my approach to mess every single day. I’m not going to sit in it too long because there’s life to live, and I’m not making a life of enabling or cleaning up other people’s messiness. Saying ‘No, thanks’ can also be an act of compassionate care. My value transcends tropes.
Anything you want to make sure our readers know?
I want people to know that, if they are feeling a range of things, to me it is an indication that you are, in fact, a human — and I’m glad to hear it. Nuance cannot be understated in my world, and Mikhal, thank you for infusing nuance into your newsletter consistently2. It can be so very easy to retreat and close aperture to a narrow place in these times, and that often puts people’s lives in danger in a myriad of ways. I care about the lives of others and the impact my decisions have, not just in my little microcosm of a world but the larger one, and I am grateful to see that sensibility reflected here, even among gobs and gobs of unavoidable mess, chaos, anxiety and doubt.
There is still so much wonder, curiosity, conviction of justice and actual hope, and it’s a reminder to not let anyone or anything rob you of your awareness that you contain multitudes, and if you do, you can’t be the only one. Use it or lose it and share it. I’ve had two life mottos for myself since I was a teen: 1) “Always be a catch” and 2) “Mensch academy is always in session.” As a person and an artist, may I always be both, and I hope I was a reflection of both here. Thanks again, friend.
Welcome to the Chaos Palace is the space where I write about ADHD, queerness, Judaism, and how to navigate the mess that is the world. You can support my work by sharing this post with others, subscribing, or clicking the like button. Or just read! That’s huge, too.
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Namely, towards more death and destruction and away from peace and security.
This made me blush, but I left it in anyway :)