8 minute read
BRIANA HANSEN
ON CHASING CREATIVITY AND HOW AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL RAP PERFORMANCE CHANGED HER LIFE
Do you know what lesson I’m currently embracing?” asks Briana Hansen, a 2000 Sycamore graduate who has built a career as an actress, voiceover artist, podcaster, and writer. “The fact that life has seasons. Sometimes you have the time and energy to be completely career-focused. Other times it’s family. And sometimes it’s some surprising wildcard issue you never could have seen coming.” Hansen, who lives in Los Angeles, has come a long way, through many seasons, literally and figuratively, from Xavier University in Cincinnati, where she earned her B.A. degree in the school’s Philosophy, Politics and the Public Honors Program, to now, where she is prolific as an artist, busy as a mom, and constantly looking to find the embedded humor in life. “I’m learning to do my best to stay present in whatever season it is now rather than always trying to balance everything equally,” she says. “I put a lot of emphasis on proving my worth through producing tangible achievements for a very long time. But thanks in large part to my baby boy, Aiden, I’ve recently embraced that some of my best creative work is done in the pausing, breathing, and just enjoyment of a seemingly less ‘productive’ time.” AFTER trying improvisational comedy in college, Hansen heard the voice in her head telling her the arts might be her calling. She jumped in. She was good. Quickly,
Advertisement
“she realized that if she wanted to focus on a career in comedy, she would need to move to a bigger market, so she packed up and moved to Chicago, where she was selected to train with the “Second City” company, one of the legendary training grounds for comedy. That led her to write a solo show called Femoir that she performed on a Second City stage and took on the road. After touring the country, she next moved to Los Angeles, where she studied improv and comedy at University of California Berkley, The Groundlings, and The Pack Theater. She produced Femoir again at The Second City Hollywood before turning it into a podcast.
[ CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE ]
[ CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE ] She has been featured on ComedyCentral, TruTV, and AmazonTV. What all this seems to mean in Briana-land is that there might really be no tangible “less-productive” time. Instead it is timemanagement, vignettes of creative inspiration, and a focus on family and on funny. “Right now, my days are mostly focused on raising an empowered, healthy, and hopefully funny child,” she says. “When he’s not my main focus, I’m pitching TV projects and manuscripts I’ve already written and have on the horizon. Plus, every night, one of my dogs demands that she gets a massage and cuddles. I’m dedicated to that practice.”
IN the fall of 2020, Hansen produced a video for the Sycamore Alumni Speaker Series. She talked to Sycamore students and families, exploring a number of topics like career, education, and following one’s internal voice. Part of her presentation was spent examining, from the perspective of 20 years beyond Sycamore, what might be important for graduates of Sycamore to know as they move forward through high school, college, and onward. “I feel really passionate about one specific thing,” she says when asked about that video talk and how she hopes her words might help a student figure some things out for themselves. “Failure is normal and part of the learning process. Push through it if you really want something. And be willing to let things go when they’re not serving you anymore. One of my challenges as a gifted person, who was naturally pretty good at a lot of things, was pushing through when someone was better than me or when I reached a certain level and failure became normal. I would get frustrated quickly or immediately question myself. But if you want to be excellent at anything, even if you have a head start, there will always be that point where you fail. Learning to overcome it, while incorporating the lessons learned from the failure, is absolutely vital. Resilience is much more important than natural talent.” “One of my biggest takeaways from my Sycamore experience was that people are gifted in a number of different ways. It’s exciting to find out what those ways are and how they can help challenge you to learn and grow further.”
IT was the Sycamore 6th Grade class production of Fiddler on the Roof that sparked a fire in the mind of then-2ndgrader Briana. In a 2016 interview, she remembers being blown away. “I was so struck by the majesty of this musical that I went home and I rented the VHS of Fiddler on the Roof. I went home and wrote my own version of it and gave all my friends parts.” That ability to ingest emotion and turn it into tangible, passionate creativity has been a trait that Hansen has carried with her. “I can honestly say that part of what I loved about my Sycamore experience was that the teachers were all so passionate. It was easy to be excited about a multitude of different subjects because every teacher excelled at making their particular subject interesting to me,” she says. Hansen has memories of Sycamore lessons that continue to resonate with her and help her find creativity in herself and everyday life. For a school focused on teaching gifted students, she found other lifelong lessons at Sycamore that existed outside of the classes of math, science, and other traditional subjects.
Briana Hansen, (right) and her friend, Kellee Miller, (left) during the Sycamore trip to Washington, D.C.
“I loved the pointillism project with Mrs. Prince. I remember learning there can be purples and blues in white snow and it reminded me that the world is full of all sorts of exciting details if we’re willing to just take time to look closer,” she says. “Learning music with Mrs. Fair has continued to serve me to this day in both understanding discipline and keeping my creative expression flowing. And Mrs. Powell’s introduction to Shakespeare was a game-changer for me, as you can imagine based on my own career path. What I valued was the arts and creativity. I feel like so often in our culture, and many times in education, that the arts are the first thing to fall by the wayside. I think the arts are so vital and invaluable to people whether or not you pursued (that type of) career.” It was also more than the arts at Sycamore that Hansen remembers. “I think I learned more in Mr. Stroebel’s history classes than I did in many classes in college. And shout out to Mr. Fink for delightful gym classes that helped a high-energy person like myself blow off some steam so my brain could work better the rest of the day.”
– PABLO PICASSO
Hansen tell the story of a seminal moment for her at Sycamore, probably more likely a couple of minutes back in 1992. It changed her life. “In 1st grade, I came back from recess, and I was really obsessed with this rap from the movie FernGully, a 1992 film about the environment. I really wanted to perform it for my classmates, and my teacher let me. What happened when I did this for my peers and classmates was really small but really important,” she says. “I started the rap. I got really into it—so into it—that I don’t remember it except that when it was over it felt so good to perform like that, and that was like this little notch in my brain that has never gone away. It is a testament to the fact that my teacher let me do it. It’s fair to say we as humans are gifted in different ways and my teacher recognized that. Rather than quelling that desire to perform and having that be a burden to her, she let me do the rap from FernGully, and it has stuck with me all these years.” Maybe those minutes were the sprouting of the creativity seed that would continue to grow. Or maybe that had already happened before deciding performing a rap song in 1st Grade was important. What is evident is that Briana Hansen was that gifted student who was a non-traditional learner. Her right brain imaginative tendencies have taken her to the West Coast to keep chasing her calling and her creative life. Her left brain skills, those of logic and linear thinking, keep her focused. “Don’t worry about it if you don’t know what you want to be. All you have to do in your world and your life is figure out what it is that you’re curious about and follow that curiosity,” she says. “Figure out the things that you like to do as a result of that curiosity and that will hopefully lead you to your passion. Keep doing that for your entire life. We’re always growing and changing, and that will help you to become the best person that you can absolutely be. And always keep learning. I feel like that is a valuable lesson.” Hansen is currently working on a comedic memoir about becoming a mom in the middle of a pandemic. Check out MommyMomMom.com. •
FIND MORE ABOUT BRIANA AT
