MESSAGE FROM THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER practices. In August, when so much activity had halted, we launched a live Digital Theatre Festival across a range of platforms. Then, by early October, we had seven productions on stages including a fully-fledged musical with a live orchestra – possibly the most live production activity anywhere in the world at the time, and the quality was extraordinary.
During my first year as CEO, I have been struck by the incredible creative DNA, extraordinary skills and can-do attitude of NIDA’s community. These qualities have helped us to navigate an immensely challenging time and to harness the opportunities of disruption. 2020 was a year of extreme challenges on many fronts, managed by creative and dynamic innovation every step of the way. NIDA drew on what we knew from performance education: improvisation, connection with audiences, lateral problem solving and courage, to ensure ‘the show must go on’. These skills helped us continue learning, producing thrilling creative work that was both virtual and live, and inventing new futures for the performing arts. Performing arts is changing and broadening, as new settings, new technologies and new practices evolve and reinvent forms and find new audiences. NIDA continues to explore ways to engage, captivate and inspire all Australians with our national stories, however they are delivered. 2020 required us to carefully balance the needs of COVID safety while we prioritised high quality higher education and diploma courses, finding new ways to deliver practice-based experiential learning across online and classroom learning, and creative production experiences. We made the most of the opportunities borne out of the ongoing disruptions – staff and students threw themselves into rapid innovation, shifting to new modes of operation and exploring the possibilities of new performance 8
We worked with the constraints to COVID to imagine and innovate, building and hosting extraordinary shows: the Weimar Kabarett intimate cabaret show in June; Unplugged, a performance of two handers from Bachelor of Arts third year students; Magic Show with special effects; Articulate, in which students voiced characters in famous screen scenes; Showcases; Writers’ Readings; and the Festival of Emerging Artists to close out the year in December. The scale, ambition and quality of the creative work was a testament to the talent and collective passions of NIDA’s community. Despite unprecedented obstacles, the Digital Theatre Festival, improvised during lockdowns, showcased the potential of performative practices across digital platforms and evidenced the ingenuity of the NIDA community. We pushed the boundaries of performance experiences through interactive performances on gaming platform Twitch: productions filmed in collaboration with performers that poignantly captured the experience of the pandemic, and live multi-camera productions, adapting existing software
and technology to create low tech multi-camera studios. This focus on virtual/emerging technologies is now embedded in NIDA’s core practice. The experience of these productions – learning through making – equips students to work in a huge range of contexts. We engage with a changing industry to map and inspire the widest possible range of futures and careers for our students, whose skills can be applied in an ever-broadening set of roles and contexts in the knowledge economy. Industry collaboration continues to be integral to the delivery of NIDA’s education and performance programs. Industry specialists share their expertise in NIDA education programs, lead creative productions across stages and screens, and provide valuable mentoring. During 2020, global industry specialists shared their knowledge through virtual classrooms and NIDA hosted 21 publicly released ‘In Conversations’ with industry leaders online. These included Joel Edgerton, winner of 9 ACCTA awards and BAFTA nominated alumna Shannon Murphy, Kate Mulvany OAM, Emmy award winning Digital Storyteller Sean Stewart, and Alumna Sally Riley Head of Scripted at ABC. NIDA’s partnerships are central to helping us realise our ambition and 2020 showed us how important they are to our ongoing sustainability. Our historic success in generating significant nongovernment revenue to support core
