This Women’s Month, I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with our Kreative of the Month, Azande Dubé, and what started as interview podcast, very quickly became one of those conversations that could have gone on for hours.

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Azande is a truly multifaceted creative. She is a performer, singer, actor and content creator, but beyond all the titles she is simply someone who loves telling stories.

From a young age, when people asked what she wanted to do, her answer was always to “sing, dance and act.” A perfect combo for musical theatre. Content creation developed just as naturally for her. Growing up as an only child, she remembers recording herself on her laptop and finding ways to entertain herself. A true desire to entertain and create.

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It felt particularly fitting to have Azande as our Kreative of the Month during Women’s Month. When I asked which women had most inspired her, she immediately spoke about her mother and aunt. Two very different women who valuable teachings. Her mother taught her patience and brought a calm, logical perspective, while her aunt encouraged the more whimsical side of her personality. Most importantly, both have supported her creative ambitions from the beginning, an unfortunately rare thing in the creative arts industry.

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Then we chatted about one of my favourite conversations: our mutual distaste of the pressure to “niche down.”

Azande believes that asking creatives to box themselves into one thing can be contradictory to creativity itself. You can have strengths without those strengths becoming limitations. You can sing and act and present. You can make a cooking video today and a beauty video tomorrow. You are allowed to try things, fail at them, discover new interests and change your mind.

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​​​​​​​​​​Azande said, “I think that’s the fun in being a creative. There are so many things that can stimulate you and excite you, and being able to try them all is the joy in it.”

That freedom has also played an important role in how she thinks about burnout. A topic I have felt, and was super excited to get her perspective on.

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Azande spoke openly about coming off a busy production and suddenly finding herself uninspired once life became quieter. Her biggest lesson has been understanding that having free time does not mean it has to be filled with something. Sometimes free time is simply rest. Something we can all learn a bit more about, I think.

Behind something that looks effortless can be hours of filming, editing, lighting, planning and performing. Azande’s advice was that when your body tells you that you are struggling, listen to it.

We spoke about her journey as a vocalist and something she had previously mentioned at Musical Mondays: the expectations placed on her voice as a black woman.

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Azande began with musical theatre vocal training and developed what she describes as a more classical or “legit” sound. Moving into musical theatre, she sometimes encountered assumptions about how she should sound based on how she looked, including comments asking her to make something “sound more black.”

What I loved about what she said was, that it was not about rejecting any particular vocal style. It was about rejecting the assumption that this is all a black female performers can or should sound like. For Azande, graduating and choosing material for herself has created an exciting opportunity to discover everything her voice is capable of. Including her love for Ballads… me too girl.

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She also has something very exciting already on the horizon, having booked Oliver! premiering in December.

By the end of our conversation, everything seemed to come back to one idea: do not limit yourself.

Try new things. Have fun. Rest when you need to. Remember why you started. Look at how far you have already come. When your creativity starts becoming all about deadlines, algorithms, auditions, and campaigns, try reminding yourself why you started doing it in the first place.

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Azande said it best, “There’s only one version of you.”

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I think that is a pretty epic reminder for all of us.