We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Derek Van Barham. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Derek Van below.

Derek, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. 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 am so happy as a creative. I am also happy as a queer person. I mention both because I hold them so close together in the way I identify and create. I see both as gifts, opportunities to see the world in a different way. Being creative and being queer have influenced so much of my process and the way I engage, making me more grateful, more motivated and more unique. I’m at my happiest when creating, but that doesn’t mean I always get to spend my time in the creative sphere. My “regular” job is in marketing, thankfully for an arts organization. So full-on creation mode is a bit in the margins, specifically evenings and weekends. I would love more creative opportunities that allow financial stability, but I do think each artist figures out that balance: what pays the bills and creates space and time for making art? The balance is different for everyone, and I’m very content with my current situation.

Derek Van, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Hey hey! My name is Derek Van Barham (he/him) and I am a director and choreographer living in Chicago.

I was originally a performer (all of my formal training is in acting), but my interests and skill sets evolved after grad school.

I love collaborating with other artists to create immersive theatrical worlds that are whimsical yet dark, possessing a playfulness with a bit of an edge. I’m firm believer in the immediacy of live performance, the “this is happening right now” of being in front of an audience. To quote Tennessee Williams, “I don’t want realism. I want magic!”

For the past 10 years, I’ve been able to experiment with plays, musicals, dance shows, operas and original devised pieces that pull from the investments of the people in the room. I’m drawn to new work (I love having the playwright/composer in the room) and worlds that are queer (in every sense of the word).

I love physically engaged theatre, movement and physicality forward, kinetic and alive and as close to the audience as we can bear. I love theatre when it is sharp,

specific, and doesn’t give the audience all the answers.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I believe that great process begets great product, and strive for a satisfying experience for both artists and audience. Whether directing, choreographing or producing, I try to showcase the strengths of my collaborators and make each show unique to the people creating it with me. For me, the success of the show isn’t just retaining the audience and getting them to come back, but also treating the actors and creative team members in such a way that they’d also return to work with me again.

I also try not to tell stories that aren’t mine to tell. I rarely take on shows that I don’t see myself in. That often registers as a queerness or otherness in the characters or world of the show or in what the company is hoping to achieve in the production. I feel like I often bounce back and forth between highly stylized camp comedy and utterly dark eeriness. Something is always askew, at least in my head. A former improviser who loves David Lynch and horror movies… it makes sense to me.

And as informed as my work is by a love of cinema, I can’t reiterate enough my focus on the live experience. We compete so much with streaming, with movies, with 2 pandemic years of social atrophy, that we really do need to give an audience a reason to get out and come to us. And that’s by giving them something that can only be experience in the moment, in the room, in the world we have created for them.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Being able to say “I don’t know.”

For some reason, I always feared that as an answer when working on a show. Especially as a director, trying to appear all knowing and in control, “I don’t know” felt like such a letdown. I was worried I’d lose trust or respect from my collaborators.

So, then I would spend 5-10 minutes rambling and reaching to finally circle back to either “I don’t know” or a response so confounding that everyone in the room knew the real answer. “So….you don’t know?”

Now, almost all of my directing “training” has been in the room, experiential. A few shows in, I was craving books and other resources to add to my vocabulary. And I found a copy of “Notes on Directing” in a thrift store, and it had a quote of praise from Judi Dench on the cover. So I had to buy it. And there’s a whole page that just says “It’s ok to say when you don’t know something.” And it was a lightbulb moment.

So now I embrace it. I make note of the question, say “I don’t know” and then move forward. If possible, I try to give a sense of when I expect an answer or even if the answer is important to me or the show. We don’t waste time. We keep working on what we do know, or acknowledge the not knowing and problem solve together. That sort of acknowledgment actually BUILDS trust, because no one has all the answers, and it leaves the door open to finding them as a team.

“I don’t know…. and that’s ok.” It feels good. Try it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.derekvanbarham.com
• Instagram: @dvbarham
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/derek.v.barham/
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/derek-van-barham

Image Credits
Photos by Michael Brosilow, Evan Hanover, Jennifer Heim, Austin D. Oie and Cole Simon.