The Australian

New Nida Head Kate Cherry Is One Of Few Women Leaders In Theatre

Cherry’s challenge involves swapping a $6 million turnover, Perth-based theatre company for a multi-headed, $27m turnover beast, with myriad outposts and often disparate-seeming ambitions. “I love delegating,” she says. “And I adore problemsolving. I tend to look at it the same way as being a director. In the theatre you want to be surrounded by the very best people and hand over to them.”

“NIDA in its next incarnation will have more interest in blending all our different skills and make us be experts in collaboration and innovation,” Cherry says. “I know it’s become cliched but we’ve got this incredible foyer and into that foyer I want scientists, doctors, business people training from UNSW, people dropping by because we have such a great activated foyer and getting them into collaboration with us.”

“We’re practice-led,” Cherry says. She is a theatre director while deputy director Michael Scott-Mitchell is a designer of great repute. “That differentiates us,” she says.

NIDA has long been the school that aspiring actors want to go to, and the annual report reveals it is still extremely competitive to get a place in the undergraduate program.

Kate Cherry: ‘I adore problem-solving. I tend to look at it the same way as being a director’. Picture: Renee Nowytarger

Kate Cherry isn’t a newcomer to Australia’s performing arts. Far from it: she’s third generation theatre folk and all that implies.

Her grandfather was a designer and her father was former Melbourne Theatre Company artistic director Wal Cherry, so performance pulses through her veins. She is married and has a son with American actor Kenneth Ransom.

Now, after almost a decade in Western Australia, where she was running Black Swan State Theatre Company, Cherry has moved to Sydney and taken the reins from Lynne Williams of the nation’s highest-profile acting school, the National Institute of Dramatic Art.

NIDA, according to its 2015 annual report, takes in about 60 first-year students a year in Sydney and reaches another 16,000 through the many classes and courses its runs across the country.

Founded in 1958 and federally funded (though not through the university system), NIDA aims to be the country’s leading centre for education and training in the performing arts. Its teachers are industry professionals from across the dramatic disciplines including acting, writing, staging, movement, voice, costume and production design.

Graduates include Mel Gibson, Robyn Nevin, Judy Davis, Catherine Martin, Baz Luhrmann and Cate Blanchett — but one could easily argue that these powerpacks would have had their careers without NIDA, while NIDA has traded off their success for a generation.

Activated foyers aside, Cherry says NIDA is a custodian of empathy. “At the same time we’ve got a design school looking at virtual reality, great technology, wonderful voice teachers, movement,” she says. “We’re covering the gamut. What we’re not doing enough is blending the influence of our corporate NIDA with our students.

“When John Clark set up NIDA (and then remained its director for 35 years) he talked about the business of theatre and I think individuals now need to be safe and secure in the knowledge they know how to empower themselves, not just as individual artists but they know how to promote themselves. The industry is changing. When I started I didn’t have to think about Facebook or whatever. The endless opportunities are both anxiety-producing and exciting. I want our students to come out resilient and ready for lots of different adventures.”

NIDA’s graduates are preparing for an industry where they move across performance modes, but at its core the school is steered by old school theatremakers.

“It’s always contributed to the Australian film and television and theatre industry, and it’s always had a passion about the Australian voice. I’m looking at the new kinds of actors we’re training and the skill sets that are required as we’re going into virtual reality, gaming. We’ve got corporates, children from all over Sydney plus we’re national and we contribute to the international scene, extending and deepening is how I’ve put it,” Cherry says.

With this complexity of services, how does a school stay true to its core mission of training the next generation of performing artists? “We are a business and we’re an art school,” she says.

Cherry contends that each side of the remit has something to offer the other. The business contacts brought into the school’s orbit through courses designed to teach them to present better also bring business skills the young graduates need to manage their careers into the future.

“We’re also talking to the industry a lot, always making sure we’re up to date and offering the skill set people want right now.”

Whereas NIDA used to send out waves of people who would collaborate, such as the Strictly Ballroom team, she says “now we’re looking at people who have to run themselves as their own brand”.

“I want students coming out who can dominate the industry, have sustainable careers, but in order to protect their artistry they need to understand themselves as businesses at the same time.”

A topic close to Cherry’s heart is how slowly Australia’s performing arts have embraced gender equality. Her father’s alma mater, the MTC, has never had a female artistic director, except for the year Robyn Nevin and Pam Rabe shared the job for a year with Aidan Fennessy awaiting Brett Sheehy’s arrival. Nevin previously ran both Sydney Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Company, and Cate Blanchett was co-artistic director of STC with her husband Andrew Upton.

“Certainly (men are) still in charge of the performing arts,” Cherry says. “The other thing we don’t talk about that is very dear to my heart is that even if theatres manage to give women as many opportunities as men, are they giving them as much money?

“One of the things I was passionate about at Black Swan was if I was passionate about a mature female writer, for example, we would invest heavily in that play and take a long time before we put it on stage.

“One of the really disturbing things with the Australia Council losing much of its funding (recently restored in part) is the small to medium sector was hit, and that’s where a lot of women go to set up companies that are not like the majors.

“As an old-fashioned leftie, I say I don’t want to see four women out of eight people working in the theatre, I want to see four women out of eight people getting 50 per cent of the money. This is one of the reasons I went to NIDA: we need to see women producing, we need to look at the annual reports and see where does the money go. It’s not enough to say we’ve got 50 per cent of women if they’re sent to the basement.

“Are they on the main stage with the same level of funding? Why do they have to be assistants? The boards obviously are the ones selecting the leaders, (so) we should be looking at the boards of our not-for-profit theatre companies and saying, ‘Are there people who are passionate about the arts? Are they people who are engaged? Are half of them female?’ ”

While everyone knows that the theatre is a world that has its exits and its entrances, and that the dramas backstage can be dark and crooked, it was boggling earlier this year when the newly appointed head of the Sydney Theatre Company, Jonathan Church, departed, and it’s possible to think of the Australian theatre at the moment as a world in which administrators can jostle for power and do their best to defeat artists. So, in this context, it is encouraging that the National Institute of Dramatic Art has appointed Kate Cherry, late of Black Swan, Perth’s premier theatre company, not only as director, but as chief executive. Here at last is a performing arts organisation, far and away the most famous drama school in the country, that has placed the administrative and financial reins in the hands of the woman who will also be calling the shots artistically and will be in charge of charting the overall direction of teaching the many skills that make up the business of creating theatre. It makes sense. Kate Cherry, with her famously quiet manner, has the theatre in her blood, and she is superb at going out and getting talent. She is not the kind of director who thinks the theatre is about nothing but herself.