The rogue less travelled: writing for performance at the National Institute of Dramatic Art

Abstract

The current iteration of writing for performance training at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) – the MFA (Writing for Performance) – is not only a formally accredited tertiary training offering, but also one that is pedagogically well-defined, and, in terms of course leadership and student enrolments, highly stable. However, an examination of the history of writing for performance training in Australia – particularly as this history pertains to its premier performing arts conservatoire, NIDA – tells a very different story. Beginning with the visionary yet slightly blinkered Anglo-European thinking that went into founding NIDA in 1958 – and the subsequent separation of writing for performance training from the training of its creative counterparts: acting, directing and design – this history is one characterised by relative marginalisation within the Institute, as well as identity and existential crises. Utilising, primarily, archival research, this article chronicles that history – from the inception (and ensuing iterations) of the NIDA Playwright’s Studio in 1961; to the eventual commencement of the NIDA Graduate Diploma of Dramatic Art (Playwriting) in 2010; to the NIDA MFA (Writing for Performance), from which I graduated in 2019, that exists today – with a view to reconciling this training history’s somewhat beleaguered past with its burgeoning present.