Meet Marian van Noppen

 

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Marian Van Noppen. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Marian, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

This is a loaded question for me that involves some background. I have to go back to early 90’s for a minute. Stay with me…

“Keep talking, keep recording, right now!” my mom is heard saying to me on a cassette tape we found in my old childhood Playskool tape recorder.

“Oh! Ok,” my voice replies. I then proceed to sing Colors of the Wind as I press buttons on my Lion King book (you know the one, with the button panel on the side that has the characters’ faces with corresponding audio).

Until this 30-year-old cassette tape was found in 2012, it had been 14 years since I’d heard my mother’s voice. We lost her to Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma when I was six years old. My sister was three.

As I grew up, I became known as the girl who sang. I loved performing in front of an audience — whether it be a crowd at the 5th grade chorus concert, or my family at a self-produced talent show in our living room. In hindsight, I see now that the reason I loved performing so much was because it was the only time I felt heard and seen. I think I always had my mom’s voice in the back of my mind, encouraging me to share mine.

My mom was Baha’i and raised my sister and me in the faith until she passed. Living in Greensboro, North Carolina, this was pretty progressive for the area. I didn’t actually know I was that different from other kids my age there until after she died, when we moved across town and I changed schools. I went from attending a Spanish-immersion magnet school with kids from all different backgrounds, to a conservative, neighborhood school — where we pledged allegiance to the flag in the mornings, and I was told on the playground my mom went to hell because she wasn’t a Christian. I was seven.

In too many ways, I had to grow up very fast. I got my period the summer before 5th grade — before we had sex-ed class. I learned what to do by asking a woman in the feminine products aisle at the grocery store. I was nine.

So back to the question — where do I get my resiliency from:

Growing up as a motherless daughter in the Bible Belt thrust me into extreme situations that, I think, forced me to become resilient in ways that the other kids around me just didn’t have to experience. The very foundation of my personality was built on navigating complex challenges. I don’t think a child can go through something like that and not become resilient in their own way. It’s in the makeup of who they are. It’s who I am.

Fast-forward to present day. It’s been 30 years since I recorded that cassette tape and I still love performing as much as I did then. But now my pursuit to perform is accompanied by something called “the industry”.

Any performer pursuing their dream will tell you that you have to be resilient to make it. They’ll also tell you that if you enjoy doing *literally* anything else that will make you money, then you should do that instead. I get it. I even dropped my pursuit for two years as I tried going “corporate”. I’d grown to believe “the industry” was like a bad boyfriend, giving me rare highs that I could coast on for days — weeks — months, even — then turning around and telling me all the bad things about myself and why I’m not right for the part. But when I stopped pursuing it, I could feel my creative spirit start to die. I realized the pain of not pursuing my dream was more painful than the challenges of “the industry”. So I made a promise to myself to find ways to create and perform whenever possible, while supporting myself in ways that are more fulfilling than what I found in corporate. I’m pretty sure that’s resiliency in action.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

When I visualize my life, I think of it like one giant tree with roots all over certain parts of the country. Really, the tree I see is the Angel Oak, a 500-year-old Live Oak on John’s Island, SC. I can only imagine how magnificent its roots would look if you could see their depth underground. Now that I think about it, the Angel Oak isn’t the best example — it is much more rooted than I am. The Hala tree may be more accurate, with roots that walk. But I digress. The point is, I have roots in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, DC, Chicago, Boston, and New York City — and all of these places make up so much of who I am.

I currently live in New York City with my husband Fred and our Whoodle (that’s a Wheaten/Poodle), Stella. We moved here in 2021 from Chicago after lockdown so I could pursue acting. I’d received my MFA in Acting from DePaul in 2019, only to enter “the industry” right before the world shut down.

To support myself financially (because we all know to pursue acting, you typically need a side hustle), I provide a myriad of virtual services to a small number of women entrepreneurs. I do everything from website development, to client coordination, to content creation, to ghostwriting, to CRM masterminding, and more. I am fortunate that the women I work for believe in my creativity and my personal dream of performing on Broadway. I think it’s because they’re pursuing their dreams, too, and know the sacrifices one must make in order to make those dreams a reality.

Because so much of what I do for my clients spans the expertise of several different job titles, I really don’t know what to call myself these days. Virtual Wiz? Right-hand? Ops Orchestrator? If you have any ideas, please let me know. I’m currently soliciting suggestions.

To feed my creative spirit alongside my side hustles, I take acting class every week, I take voice lessons every month, and I sing in a Heart cover band. I cover the Nancy Wilson part (sadly, I do not share Nancy’s pro guitar skills, but we can dream!) I am also a visual artist! I love drawing and frequently take commissions (it’s my favorite side hustle). Most of my commissions are of dogs, but I love drawing wild or extraordinary animals the most. My favorite portrait I’ve ever done was of a camel for my Aunt Martha, who I swear was straight out of a Tennessee Williams’ play. She was one of my biggest supporters and she *always* believed in me. She passed in 2018 from cancer.

My current personal goal is to get signed by a New York agency to represent me for theatre, film, TV, and voiceover work. It’s the next big step in this pursuit for me.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Something that I love about the work I do for my virtual clients is that I get to adopt their voice — which goes hand-in-hand with acting. Being able to step into my clients’ shoes, learn their voices, and tell their stories, is so enriching to me. I think it’s why artists make such great virtual assistants. We’re trained in taking on characters, learning to think like them, adopting their mannerisms and expressions. That’s exactly what I do when I ghostwrite, when I design, and when I speak with my client’s customers. I get to tell their story.

Also, I love visual art and the role it plays in the work I do for my virtual clients. I mentioned my Aunt Martha — she, too, was a visual artist, as were several other women in my lineage. So visual art feels very personal to me and it’s something that comes naturally that I *get* to enjoy in my side hustles.

Lastly, I have to thank my late mom and grandfather for this one — I love computers. You know how some dancers say, “I’ve been dancing since I was three!” Well, I’ve been on computers since I was three — back when my mom had MS-DOS and we used floppy disks. My grandfather worked for IBM, so he ensured we had a computer as early as possible. I’m a millennial, so I’m part of the generation that grew up writing HTML on myspace like it was an email. It just comes naturally, and I love that I can lend those skills to my clients’ businesses.

My dad has always said, “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life,” and I think that’s true. So if you can find something you truly love, and you find a way to make a living doing it, then that’s the key to success in my opinion.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

Breaking into the acting industry is truly a marathon, not a sprint. I have to remember to compare my success to how far I’ve come, and not how far I still have to go to get to where I want to be. Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now has been particularly useful in helping me become content with where I am, right now. At one point, the book asks of its reader to question themselves, “Is anything actually missing in this moment?” The answer is probably no. And that’s really powerful. So, I’m trying to keep that principle in mind as I pursue my goals (such as getting New York representation).

I’ve also found Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way to be particularly helpful in rekindling my creativity. One thing it’s illuminated for me is that the difference between a working artist and a non-working artist often comes down to sheer audacity.

Here’s a quote from the book: “Very often audacity, not talent, makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist – hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to the light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the torch.”

If we hold ourselves back from creating (or auditioning, for example!) because we fear it won’t be “good enough”, then we hold ourselves back from possible success. If I refrain from putting myself out there instead of just going for it, then I keep myself from sharing my gift(s) with someone else who may enjoy it. And who knows? Maybe a performance of mine I didn’t feel great about is actually the one someone else loves.

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