About FesteVale
A philosophy first. A set of tools second. A way of living with the full arc of the creative life — honestly, without collapsing under it.
What Is FesteVale?
FesteVale is a maker of tools for the creative life — planners, journals, vocabulary guides, and frameworks built specifically for people who work in the creative and performing arts.
We make things for freelancers, musicians, artists, writers, and performers — people whose financial and emotional lives don't fit neatly into the tools built for everyone else.
The Name
Latin for festival. The celebration. The abundance. The lanterns lit, the crowd gathered, the work celebrated. The days you work toward.
Latin for farewell — the valediction, the goodbye. The passage, the mourning, the grief. The place you have to walk through to reach the next festival.
The creative life is both of these, always. FesteVale tools are built for both — for Feste, for Vale, and for the gap between, without pretending any one of the three doesn't exist.
"What's to come is still unsure. In delay there lies no plenty; then come kiss me, sweet and twenty — youth's a stuff will not endure."
— Feste, in Shakespeare's Twelfth NightFeste is the philosopher-fool of Twelfth Night — the clown who sees most clearly, who sings about both joy and loss. The name carries this lineage.
What We Believe
- The numbers are not separate from the art. Understanding your finances is part of sustaining your practice — not a concession to the non-creative world.
- Generic tools don't fit creative lives. A musician's income looks nothing like a salaried employee's. A visual artist's expenses are not the same as a freelance writer's. The tools should reflect the actual shape of your work.
- The inner life of the practice matters. Fear, doubt, momentum, identity, seasons of abundance and scarcity — these are not distractions from the work. They are the work. Journal prompts that meet you there are tools, not indulgences.
- You don't have to figure this out alone. FesteVale tools are designed to be companions — not prescriptions. Take what fits. Leave what doesn't.
"Our strength grows out of our weakness."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, CompensationWho This Is For
FesteVale is for anyone building a creative practice — whether you're in the first terrifying year of freelancing, decades into a performance career, or somewhere in the long middle.
It is especially for people who:
- Have irregular, seasonal, or project-based income
- Feel anxious, confused, or ashamed about their finances
- Want to understand money without becoming a money person
- Are trying to sustain a practice that the world doesn't always make easy
- Know Feste, Vale, and the gap between intimately
The Figure
The FesteVale figure holds both Feste and Vale simultaneously — barefoot, robed, unguarded. She is the festival and the farewell. She is what it looks like to carry both without collapsing under either one.
The Creator
Adrian Deane Brannen-Jurgenson
FesteVale was built out of a cycle I did not choose and could not skip.
Most of my twenties went to forty-hour weeks in financial planning and analysis, steady work that rewards you for never asking what else you might be. Leaving it for an acting career meant giving up income, identity, and the comfort of already knowing how the story ends. The stage gave back what the spreadsheets had taken. It also asked for its own kind of payment, and eventually performing paused, then slowed, not because I stopped loving it, but because a counseling program and a psychoanalytic training I am still in the middle of asked louder.
Twenty years of teaching children to swim, first in Japan and then in California, taught the same lesson from a smaller angle. Every child had to let go of the wall before doing anything worth celebrating, and I watched that exact fear cross the same six feet of water hundreds of times, in two countries, in two languages, in two different alphabets of goodbye.
Feste is what I get to call the celebration. Vale is what I have to call the leaving. FesteVale was never a slogan, found and then lived up to. It is the name I finally gave to a pattern I had already lived more than once, gladly, painfully, and then gladly again.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."
— Walt Whitman, Song of MyselfOn Stage
A professional performance career spanning decades of theatre, film, and voice work — and the lived knowledge of what it costs and what it gives. Essays on key roles across that career are gathered in a forthcoming actor's autobiography.
For the full performance resume and recognition: adriandeane.com →
In Finance
A decade working in financial services in the Greater Bay Area — inside the money world, watching it from the perspective of someone who also lived the artist's life. That gap — between how finance speaks and how creatives actually live — is where FesteVale was born.
In Counseling
A Master of Science in Clinical Counseling grounds the emotional and psychological dimension of FesteVale's tools — the belief that the inner life of a practice is not a distraction from the work, but is the work. The journals, the consulting, the framework — all of it comes from this.
In Writing
Academic essays on theatre and grief appear in the Eugene O'Neill Review — "My Anna Christie" (No. 45.2, Spring 2024) and "Mourning Lavinia, Becoming Electra" (forthcoming, Spring 2026). A poetry collection, Let Love Let Go, and the book FesteVale are also in progress.
Tools for wherever you are in the work.