Courtney Stewart compares the brutal audition process for children's music group Hi-5 to singing competition juggernaut The X Factor.
Surviving a series of auditions in which a large group of hopefuls was culled by 50 per cent each day, she made it to the top 10 — but did not get the job: "I was so close! … It would've changed my life. It would've been amazing. [But] it wasn't meant to be."
Hi-5 was particularly close to Stewart's heart: Filipina Australian singer and dancer Kathleen de Leon Jones, from the band's original line-up, was her first Asian Australian role model in the media.
"Seeing her on stage meant so much to me … I really, really wanted to be her," she says.
Stewart has become a role model in her own right, however, as an Asian Australian creative, rapidly ascending Australia's theatre scene to become, at the age of 34, the artistic director of La Boite Theatre in Brisbane.
She is part of a wave of women who have taken on the top jobs at Australian theatre companies in the last year, including Kate Champion at Black Swan State Theatre Company of WA, Anne-Louise Sarks at Melbourne Theatre Company, and Frances Rings at Bangarra Dance Theatre.
Notably, Stewart is the only woman of colour to lead a major non-Indigenous theatre company. She is also the first person of colour to lead La Boite in its almost-100-year history.
Stewart's relationship with La Boite started almost 20 years ago when she saw her first professional stage production, a new Australian work called James and Johnno by Margery and Michael Forde.
It was 2004 and she was in her penultimate year of high school: "I was just lapping it all up; seeing the power of live storytelling," she recalls.
It was the first of many school excursions to La Boite to see new Australian works.
"I always was like, 'Oh, it'd be so awesome to perform on this stage one day,'" Stewart says.
She did achieve that goal – in the premiere of Michelle Law's smash-hit Single Asian Female in 2017, and then in Julia-Rose Lewis's queer adult-gap-year rom-com Neon Tiger in 2018.
This week, Stewart reveals the programming of her first season as La Boite's leader, with a bill of new Australian plays — the kinds of stories she used to watch in high school at the very same theatre.
Three of the four plays are written by people of colour.
La Boite's 2023 season includes the previously announced gold rush drama The Poison of Polygamy, by Anchuli Felicia King (a co-production with Sydney Theatre Company); doomed relationship comedy Capricorn, by Butchulla and Kabi Kabi playwright Aidan Rowlingson; interracial adoption drama Cut Chilli, by Chenturan Aran; and queer cosplay comedy IRL, by Lewis Treston.
It's a slate that reveals Stewart's priorities: to uplift new Australian work by people from diverse communities.
From dance to drama
Stewart was set on becoming a professional dancer until drama class in high school opened a new set of possibilities.
When she first started taking drama, she was struggling academically. But she found that those 45-minute classes were a space where she could build upon the skills she already had from dancing, using movement, her voice and text to tell stories.
"Being in year 8, at a new school, as I was figuring out what my friendship groups were, that transition period is already such a moment of incredible vulnerability, and it's really tough," Stewart says.
"Drama was that one subject where I was like, 'Oh, I can bring my whole self to this.'"
By year 10, Stewart knew she wanted to be an actor.
Her parents – her dad an art teacher and her mother an architect and painter — were supportive of her creative ambitions, and the following year they drove her to Sydney to participate in a week-long musical theatre course at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA).
"I think they knew from an early age that I would be pursuing something in the creative industries," Stewart reflects.
Her approach to acting
After graduating high school, Stewart auditioned for Australia's top drama schools, including NIDA and the Victorian College of the Arts. She recalls being the only Asian Australian in the room.
"I remember auditioning … and feeling completely dismissed," she says.
While Stewart didn't score a place at drama school, she did make it onto the reserve list at the University of Southern Queensland and ended up studying drama, not acting, at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
"I was really disappointed, obviously … It's only now that I fully understand and appreciate what that did for me; that course and the teachers that I had [helped me] to be able to step into a role like this [as artistic director]," she says.
The course gave her a different approach to acting than what was taught in more traditional drama schools: "[At drama school] you have to strip yourself down, so you can be a blank slate, so you can take on both the director's process and your role."
But at QUT, Stewart learned how to safely unlock parts of herself for a role.
"My approach to acting was all about bringing my whole self to it … That definitely informed my practice as an actor. It definitely informs my practice as a director and a story developer," she says.
Now, Stewart is committed to putting measures in place that ensure that artists feel comfortable doing that personal work — including on The Poison of Polygamy, an adaptation of the first novel published by a Chinese Australian author (Wong Shee Ping, serialised between 1909-10), which she will direct.
"If the process is right and you've got considered measures in place to make that a safe thing to do, then you can make magic," she says.
"Because I'm from a diverse background, the stories and the processes that I'm involved in are about talking about lived trauma, real oppression, things that I don't think you can fabricate.
"Giving agency to actors and creatives to bring those parts of themselves [into the room] only increases the tools you have to tell the story and make it an amazing experience — for those people inside the process and for the audience."
Saving grace
Stewart's father is white and her mother is Chinese Australian, and she says there were limited opportunities for actors like her when she first started auditioning for roles after she graduated from university in 2008.
She auditioned for a role in the sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and for very small parts for Asian characters.
"It was a lot of martial arts movies. [And] I auditioned for Top of the Lake as a prostitute," she says.
"It wasn't just Chinese [roles], I was being put up for anything and everything that remotely had the word Asian in the title," says Stewart.
She recalls that her agent at the time pushed her to learn Mandarin and to change her appearance: "He was like, 'It would help if you did your eye make-up to make you look a little bit more Asian.' Because I'm mixed!"
Stewart says her "saving grace" at that time was working in children's theatre and TV.
At just 19 years old, she began performing as Tashi in the Brisbane-based company Imaginary Theatre's stage adaptations of the well-loved books by mother-and-daughter authors Barbara and Anna Fienberg.
"[On that show] I learned so much about visual storytelling and how you can make whole worlds from very little," she says.
She also starred from 2016 to 2018 in TV series Jay's Jungle, with Samoan Australian actor Jay Laga'aia.
"I feel like the stories, the content and the audience [for kids TV and theatre] are more open, more empathetic, less judgmental. It would have been way more demoralising if I didn't have that [experience]," she says.
A turning point
In 2016, Stewart performed for the first time in La Boite's Roundhouse Theatre as part of a development reading for Contemporary Asian Australian Performance's Lotus Playwriting Project. It was a series of readings from five plays by Asian Australian writers, including Single Asian Female by Michelle Law.
That reading laid the groundwork for much of Stewart's career: She has gone on to work as an actor, dramaturg and director with many playwrights from that development, including Law, Katrina Irawati Graham and Merlynn Tong; and she joined CAAP's board in 2019, becoming artistic associate in 2022.
"[The Lotus development reading] was this amazing confluence of people, places and works that I didn't know that I would end up working on in a more meaningful way for years to come," Stewart reflects.
At that reading, she took on the role of Year 12 student Mei in Single Asian Female – a part she would go on to perform at the play's Brisbane premiere at La Boite in 2017, then in its 2018 tour to Sydney (just seven weeks after the birth of her first child, son Bobby), and finally in its return to Brisbane in 2019.
"Who knew that was going to be a huge part of my life for the next four years?" Stewart marvels.
In 2016, in addition to the Lotus development, Stewart also participated in CAAP's week-long directing workshop at Sydney Theatre Company.
At the time, she was working as a teaching artist in STC's education program and dreamed of being an actor for the company. She applied for the project hoping it would give her insight into directors' processes.
"[But] that week changed my life … All of a sudden, I was like, 'Maybe I want to be a director. I love this so much. Maybe I don't mind if I ever act again because I think I just want to do this.'"
She would go on to join the CAAP Directors Initiative, a two-year skills development program building on those first workshops in 2016.
"2016 was the start of everything. Everything else [to that point] was me trying to get into the industry and get the opportunities and lay all that groundwork, but 2016 is when I felt like I started to fly," she says.
The top job
By the time the debut season of Single Asian Female at La Boite was over in 2017, Stewart knew she wanted to lead the company one day.
"[Alongside Single Asian Female], I knew that they had done Prize Fighter [by Future D. Fidel in 2015] and then there was Neon Tiger [by Julia-Rose Lewis]. There were all of these new, cool works that were coming out of La Boite [at the time]," she says.
She returned to Brisbane the following year for the debut run of Neon Tiger, where her ambition solidified.
"I was like, 'Oh, this building, this space, the types of artists that are attracted to being here and want their work on this stage — I want to be a part of that,'" she says.
But her career continued to flourish in Sydney, where she had lived with her husband since 2014. By 2018, as part of the CAAP Directors Initiative, she was working as an assistant director and dramaturg at STC, including on Anchuli Felicia King's White Pearl.
In 2021, she became the company's Richard Wherrett Fellow, a post for emerging directors, when she was seven months pregnant with her second child, daughter Nora. In the role, she was dramaturg on Kip Williams's Shakespearean cine-theatre work Julius Caesar and on Kate Mulvany's Ruth Park adaptation Playing Beatie Bow.
At the time she was appointed she told Sydney Morning Herald that she had "big dreams of wanting to be an artistic director one day".
"I'd love to do something like that because you can make meaningful change from those positions," she said.
Little did she know how soon that dream would come true.
"I was projecting 20 years into the future [when I said that] … I thought I had 10 years to direct all different types of work with all different types of actors," she says.
In early 2022, when Stewart was working as STC's directing associate, she decided to go for the La Boite job anyway — a role left vacant by previous artistic director Todd McDonald in 2020, with the company operating without a permanent artistic leader over the course of the pandemic.
"I don't know what alchemy was at work to enable me to be the one who gets custodianship over this role at this company at this time, but I feel so grateful. And I'm grabbing it with both hands," she says.
She moved back to Brisbane following her mainstage directorial debut with Michelle Law's Top Coat at STC last year.
The top job felt like a challenge she was more than up for: "I knew that I would be able to meet that challenge because there was the comfort of knowing the city, knowing the people here and having family around as well," she says.
Her first nine months in the job have involved programming her first season and applying for four-year Australia Council funding (for 2025-28).
"Being really crystal clear about what that vision is, and how we're going to deliver it, has been equal parts terrifying, daunting, insomnia-inducing, but also an incredible opportunity to be able to be really clear about what I want to do with this company," she says.
"I want to change the world, one play at a time."