Emma Holgate

From Regional NSW to Victorian Trainee of the Year

When Emma Holgate was a kid, she volunteered as a roadie for her Dad, who was the town DJ. She’d help him set up his portable PA and modest lighting rig for local gigs like her school’s disco, which she thought was pretty cool. Moving to Melbourne and a career in production was her dream when she finished high school, but without contacts or money it felt like just that – a dream. She started working in education and was considering continuing to pursue that path. “I had a yarn with a friend who had recently graduated from VCA as a theatremaker,” explains Emma. “She said, why don’t you just see what’s out there?” Emma Googled ‘sound technician work Melbourne’ and that’s how she stumbled on Arts Centre Melbourne’s traineeship program.

Art Centre Melbourne’s RTO intakes at least three individuals each year, assigned a specific discipline – Sound, Lighting or Staging – to partake in paid, on-the-job training in addition to classroom time and mentorship with industry leaders. Successful participants graduate with a Certificate III in Live Production and Technical Services and, hopefully, with their foot well and truly in the door of the industry. It is a dream opportunity for beginning a career in theatre – one that I was also lucky enough to be given – but for this reason it is a competitive application process, with well over a hundred applicants in any given year.

Emma was confident with how her interview went, but looking around the room at all the other hopefuls she knew it was still a long shot. Luckily, for both Emma and Arts Centre Melbourne, she was successful.

Overall, Emma describes her experience in the traineeship as positive; “There was no expectation that I was secretly very good at the job already. Everyone understood that I was coming in pretty fresh.” While the jump from being in a classroom to doing shifts felt like a big leap, Emma believes learning from people currently doing the job is best practice. Not only does it mean you’re learning the most up-to-date gear and methodologies, it also presents opportunities to learn alongside more senior technicians when new practices come in.

One of the first gigs Emma worked on was the Australian Ballet’s season of Don Quixote.

There was little expectation she would be doing much more than shadowing. By the time the Australian Ballet returned for their season of Swan Lake, Emma was working solo on the floor. “I realised I knew what I was doing, and if everyone else was fine for me to do it, I was fine to have a go.”

One of the reasons Arts Centre Melbourne is a great place to cut your teeth is the diversity of shows it presents. Working on the ballet provided training on a large-scale production and taught Emma the importance of building good relationships with other departments, but some of Emma’s highlights were working on smaller shows. “I enjoyed working on Share House: the Musical. That was the first show I was the head radio tech on. It was up to me to set up the whole system. It was a pretty small cast and a small creative team so while sometimes a radio mic tech can be separate from everyone, on a smaller show you feel like you’re all working together.”

By the end of the year, Murray Johnston, Senior Manager in Technical Training and Development at ACM, asked Emma if she would be willing to speak at the Victorian Skills Authority, a government body dedicated to vocational training. Emma was there to share her experience and advocate for on-the-job training. At that point she had finished the official traineeship and quickly had offers of work come up. The VSA told Emma and Murray about the Victorian Training Awards, and at their suggestion, Emma threw her hat in to be considered.

Emma was one of three finalists chosen for the awards and was invited to a ceremony at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. It was a high production value event with a full sound system and lighting rig, four projection screens, a performance up top of the show and even people riding roller-skates between the tables. Emma had no idea until her name was called out that she had won Victorian Trainee of the Year. She was automatically entered into the National Training Awards that were held in Canberra and in which she came runner-up.

The awards offered various professional development opportunities and networking events. The recognition and resulting coverage meant organisations were able to put a face to the name, but more so a name to the face of the person they had already been working alongside at Arts Centre Melbourne.

It no doubt opened doors for Emma, many of which she has stepped through. She remains casually employed at ACM in the Sound and Vision department. She is a Project Officer on Deadly Creatives, a program run by the Melbourne Theatre Company that connects young First Nations theatremakers with opportunities and which Emma describes as “building a group of people that help contribute to self-determined theatre.” As a part of this role Emma is producing upcoming performances of Peggy Sue & Wiran’s Dream – A Double Bill. This production is a part of YIRRAMBOI, a ten day First Nations-led arts festival in which Emma will also be lighting designer on the production, Three Blak Ravers, at the Beckett Theatre. Emma was recently contracted to work with BlakDance on Bunyi Bunyi Bumi which premiered as part of the AsiaTOPA festival and now has an ongoing remote role as their production coordinator.

She is a part of Ilbijerri Theatre’s BlackStage program and has just been announced as one of Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2025-26 Future Creatives participants, where she will have the opportunity to assist and be mentored by established sound and lighting designers.

Her current roles present a number of different paths Emma could take in the industry and for now she is happy with this; “I feel like even though I’m juggling a few things, they’re all a little bit different and there’s transferable skills. Sometimes information I have for one role ends up being helpful for another.”

The awards and subsequent recognition have allowed Emma opportunities to speak of her experience, but she is conscious she wants to have her own career before she focusses too much on mentoring other people. It’s not uncommon for Emma to be the only woman on a shift she is working, more common to be the only woman of colour, and even more common the only First Nations person. Emma knows diversifying the industry involves more than simply hiring people from various backgrounds; “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to make the environments better for those people once they’re in. If I’m saying ‘young women and women of colour come work in this industry’ it would be disingenuous for me not to acknowledge that sometimes men will tell me that I don’t know how to do my job. If I’m going to be an advocate for gaining diversity in the industry, I need to do some of the work to make sure things get better.”

I can confidently say that our industry is better for having Emma Holgate in it.