We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chris Browne Valenzuela. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chris below.

Chris, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Are you happier as a creative? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job? Can you talk to us about how you think through these emotions?

I don’t often think about having a regular job because I had a regular job. Before taking a hard-left turn to the arts, I worked full-time as a project engineer at a pretty major logistics firm. I despised it. I think what I hated the most was the schedules I had to keep. Most days I could finish the work they gave me in the first couple of hours, but I had to stay in the office until six because those were the rules. The office was “open-concept” so I couldn’t even occupy myself on other things; I had to stare at a spreadsheet for hours on end and pretend I was working.

I should say I also wasn’t great at it. On my six-month evaluation my boss said that keeping me would be “like keeping an orange tree that would never give oranges.” My immediate thought was “maybe it will give orange blossoms.” They did keep me for another six months before eventually firing me. On that last meeting I quoted Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: In the first chapter, the bishop of Digne keeps a small garden. In one half of his garden he grows vegetables and in the other flowers. At one point his maid asks him “Why on earth do you waste land on flowers when you could be growing potatoes?!” The bishop answered “The beautiful is as worthy as the useful… perhaps more.” I told my boss that I understood not keeping an engineer that couldn’t give any fruit, but to please never value someone only for their usefulness. I wasn’t meant for the vegetable plot, I was one of the flowers.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a theater person in its widest definition: I’m an actor, a director, a playwright and a teacher. I do feel like in this industry you have to be a multi-hyphenate. I started doing theater back in Chile, but I really started focusing on it after I moved to New York to train as an actor at Circle in the Square, where I met the unmeasurable Shelley Wyant, my mentor to this day.

Right now I’m largely focused on my original work. Most recently, my one-person show, “believe in stupid sh*t” won me the Hispanic Federation’s “Abniel Marat” award for Best Playwright, my Queer, Catholic fantasy “The Two Deaths of Saint Sebastian” played Dixon’s place “HOT Festival”, and my newest play “#daddy” won “Best Play” at the FuerzaFest One-act play competition, that took place at A.R.T./New York Theatres.

As an educator, I specialize in “Mask Work” for actors, working mostly with Neutral Masks. For those unfamiliar with them, Neutral Masks are full-face masks without an obvious expression. While wearing them, the actor is not allowed to use their voice, and the mask erases any facial articulation, so the performer is forced to learn to express themselves with nothing but their breath and body. It’s cooky stuff, but it really works! If you think about it, even evolutionarily humans developed verbal language very late in our history as a species, so if you start the exploration of a character from the text, it’s very hard to get to the truth. If you start from the body and the breath, the truth comes naturally. I currently teach mask work at the Circle in the Square Theatre School (the only conservatory in a Broadway Theater) and the Terry Knickerbocker Studio.

I often get asked what I prefer: performing or teaching. I find it to be an impossible question to answer. They feed each other. I’ve become a much better actor ever since I started teaching, and through acting my teaching stays current and relevant. Beyond that, theater especially is such a tradition, a craft. It’s passed down from generation to generation, and as a teacher I am so honored to be a part of that chain, to carry a little bit of that tradition from the older generations to the next.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Show up. Show up to your friend’s reading. Buy their print. Commission a song. It’s a little frustrating to see how the arts are generally regarded as worthless while people spend 90% of their free time consuming art, be it music, a tv show, a movie, you name it. But it’s so hard to be a “small” creative who has to beg for an audience. So, please. Show up. Maybe it won’t be that good, but even bad plays make for good stories. The worst piece of art I’ve ever seen is one of my favorite stories to tell.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I am both fortunate and unfortunate in that I am probably the most psychosomatic person I know. If something is wrong in my life, my body will let me know. So, the year I spent working full-time as an engineer I started to get sick. I got sick with the weirdest, most unusual diseases. I had to get surgery twice. I got a hip displacement. After I carried a cold for more than two weeks I went to see a doctor: my old pediatrician, she diagnosed me with a disease that normally only affects infants and the elderly and asked “how are you emotionally? Because the first thing to go is the immune system.”
But I’m tough in non-sensical ways, so I stuck with it for a little longer until I hit rock-bottom New Year’s of 2018. I won’t say exactly what that looked like. Maybe for when I write my biography, but it was bad, and I knew something had to change. So, I did something a little crazy. I had done research about Circle in the Square’s conservatory before. It was my dream school. But back then you could only audition in person, so I took a day off to fly to New York for a weekend. Mind you, I was still in Santiago, Chile. I’m sure I spent more time in the air than on land during those three days. But I auditioned for the then director of the school, and five days later I was told I had been accepted into their program. And the rest is history.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.chrisbrownevalenzuela.com
• Instagram: @browne_con_e
• Other: TikTok: @Browne_con_e