What a NIDA Graduation Taught Me About Why We Need Drama More Than Ever

A few weeks ago I sat in an auditorium and watched my son graduate from NIDA.

I expected to feel proud. I expected to cry. Both: confirmed.

There were speeches - as there always are at these things. Sigrid Thornton (my husband was thrilled!) and Sarah Snook both received honorary degrees and addressed the cohort. They were wonderful.

But it was Tony Burke MP who stopped me.

Politicians at arts events can sometimes feel a little... obligatory. You brace yourself for the polite acknowledgement, the safe applause line, and the graceful exit.

This was not that.

Tony Burke, it turns out, wanted to be a director. As a young man he could see that future for himself clearly enough to go looking for it - and was told by his school careers advisor that directing wasn't something you could study anywhere. Best focus on economics. Engineering. Something with a future in it.

So he did.

And then, years later, he found himself at a NIDA event and discovered that directing had been part of the curriculum from the very beginning. The door he'd been told was closed had never been closed at all. Someone had just told him it was, and he'd believed them.

He stood in front of those graduates - these young actors, directors, writers, designers, technicians - and looked at them the way you look at people who made it somewhere you once wanted to go. There was nothing performative about it.

He spoke to them like they were heroes.

Not metaphorically. He meant it. Because in a world where everything we read, watch, and absorb is increasingly chosen for us by an algorithm - one that is very good at showing us more of what we already think, and very good at keeping everything else just out of frame - the people who tell human stories to human beings in a room are doing something irreplaceable. Something urgent.

He wasn't congratulating them on their graduation.

He was thanking them for what they were about to do.

I've been running a drama school in Maitland for nearly 25 years. I've written before about why empathy is at the heart of everything we do [link]. I believed it when I wrote it.

But there's something about watching a man stand in the building that was always meant for him - a man who was pointed away from it at sixteen by someone who didn't know any better - and hearing him tell the next generation that their work is not optional, not extra-curricular, not a nice-to-have...

It made the argument feel very different.

Because if it's true for NIDA graduates, it's true for a nine-year-old in a Tuesday drama class in Maitland, too.

Every character a child inhabits is a life they didn't have to imagine alone. Every story they tell from the inside out is practice for the thing Tony Burke was describing - the radical, increasingly rare act of seeing the world through eyes that are not your own.

That's what we do here. It's what we've always done.

And apparently, the Hon. Tony Burke MP would like to thank us for it.

Upstage Youth Theatre has been creating brave, curious performers in the Hunter Valley for 21 years. Classes for children aged 3-16 and adults. upstageyouththeatre.com.au