Rachel Chant

UNE 2020 Rising Star Award Winner

Like most people working in the Australian arts industry, 2020 has been a year of dramatic highs and heartbreaking lows for UNE Arts and Theatre Studies alumna Rachel Chant.

Fresh from a directing role with the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) and winning the Ensemble Theatre's prestigious Sandra Bates Director's Award , Rachel felt the effects of the COVID-19 wrecking ball when it accounted for several productions she was involved in.

As the health crisis deepened, the director of the annual, 15-day Bondi Festival also had to reshape that event's program multiple times to comply with public health orders. "I was determined to pull off the festival and had plans A through F in place," Rachel says. "But we kept having to pivot to meet changing social distancing requirements and repeatedly postponed the event, before cancelling it altogether."

As disappointing as that was, adaptability and versatility have long been a hallmark of Rachel's career, starting with her initial enrolment at UNE in 2005. "I was planning on studying journalism but stuck my head into one of the theatre studies classes during O-Week, just to check it out, and promptly changed all my majors," she says. "The passion those lecturers had for theatre was contagious and I fell in love with theatre that day."

After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts, Rachel went on to complete a Master of Applied Theatre Studies to hone her craft and enhance her prospects in the notoriously cliquey theatre industry. However, it took eight years - of arts writing, hospitality work, dedicated networking and assistant roles, and directing independent productions - before Rachel made her main stage directing debut.

"My expectations were very quickly turned upside-down when I moved to Sydney," she says. "I had no connections in the theatre industry and it meant I had to do a lot more work to meet people and introduce myself."

Since then, Rachel has guest directed at NIDA, Griffin Theatre Company, Darlinghurst Theatre Company and the Australian Theatre for Young People, as well as the Australian Institute of Music and Dramatic Arts. She did a two-year apprenticeship with the Bondi Festival before being appointed Festival Director, and continued to grow the festival as it became a Waverley Council event.

MTC program producer Karin Farrell has described Rachel as a "great agent for change", capable of creating spaces where new playwrights and their works can flourish. Last year Rachel was invited to be part of the MTC's Women in Theatre program and she is equally committed to providing opportunities for other women.

"When I first arrived in Sydney, everywhere I looked the leadership was male, and if you can't see it, it's hard to be it," Rachel says. "That's one of the reasons I believe so strongly in mentoring other women and supporting them in leadership roles."

Welcoming UNE theatre interns and graduates into her theatrical spaces has enabled Rachel to help ease their transition and to build their own circles of influence. It also affords Rachel additional opportunities to collaborate, which remains a key career objective.

"Working with different artists - writers, actors, designers - to create good theatre is what really excites me," she says. "And by good theatre I mean truthful theatre, theatre that pulls at your heart and your brain, that makes you think about the way the world works, that expands the audience's empathy by capturing the authenticity of someone else's experience.

"When we went to digital live-streaming during COVID lockdowns it was still great to be able to see shows, but there's something special about sitting together in an audience and sharing the experience of live theatre and seeing the emotional impact a work has on those around you."

Next year Rachel will assist on two Ensemble productions as part of the Sandra Bates award and she's already developing a couple of new plays in readiness for 2021 and beyond, trying to get a sense of "what feels right for this extraordinary moment in history".

The world has turned and changed so much," Rachel says, "but we humans are so adaptable and theatre is an important vehicle for both processing and creating change.

Congratulations Rachel, one of this year's UNE Rising Stars.