Craig Whitehead has channelled his love for performance into a management role at the WA Symphony Orchestra.
CRAIG Whitehead says he was six or seven when he saw his first theatrical performance, at his primary school in Brisbane.
The performance had a powerful effect, releasing a passion that has led him down the creative path to his current position as chief executive of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.
He says it is one of his earliest and most vivid memories.
“I can tell you some of the songs they sang, I can picture what they were wearing, almost what they look like. It is an incredibly vivid memory for me. I was a pretty shy boy, and I remember thinking ‘wow, I want to do that’,” Mr Whitehead says.
It took 10 years to work out just how he was going to become an actor, and when he reached year 11 he took drama classes and went on to study drama at acting college.
“It is a funny thing; when you start this thing of wanting to be an actor, I don’t think you are fully aware of the realities of it,” he says.
“It was tough; for me it was about trying to get a name, trying to get a body of work behind me, trying to get experience and a profile in a professional environment.”
Quickly realising that acting was more difficult in the world outside of the comforts of college, Mr Whitehead developed a theatre education company with a friend who was also feeling the effects of an industry heavy on the supply side and light on demand.
“I was taking excerpts of plays into high schools throughout Queensland, so that is where the arts management kind of got started,” he says.
Listening to Mr Whitehead recount stories from his days at school, the dots between his experiences as a fledgling actor are logically connected to starting his own educational outfit.
“The first performance I ever did was in year 11, of a Greek tragedy and I was so scared,” he says.
“I went on stage and was as much of a statue as any Greek statue could possibly be. I had a wonderful teacher who pulled me aside afterwards and said, ‘you can do this, you’ll get better’.
“The power of a great teacher gave me the confidence to think, ‘I can do this’.”
Nevertheless, Mr Whitehead felt he was at a fork in the road.
“I remember seeing Parkinson or one of those shows and Sir John Gielgud or one of those famous British actors. The inevitable question came up, ‘do you have any advice for up and coming actors’, and he said, ‘you should only become an actor if you need to become an actor, wanting to become an actor isn’t enough’,” Mr Whitehead says.
He returned to study a graduate diploma in business administration, later completing his masters in the field, which then directed him to what he calls a dream position at his favoured Laboite Theatre in Brisbane, where he had performed before.
“I had worked for that company as an actor and loved it for all it stood for, so to go back there as general manager was really special,” Mr Whitehead says.
After exhausting all the opportunities presented by this ‘dream role’, after eight years he was keen to experience a new challenge, and so moved his family to WA to take up the position of chief executive of the WA Opera.
He says his role at WASO has been his most challenging yet.
Two of the major focuses for WASO during his five-year tenure, three years of which remain, is broadening the reach of its regional program and finding a new home for the company that can encompass the orchestra as well as the business administration.
“Regional touring is something I would love us to do, at the moment we are not in a position to take the entire orchestra to regional Western Australia but I would love to do that. We are the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, not the Perth symphony orchestra,” he says.