Vardaan International Academy in Gomti Nagar hosted something on 13th July 2026 that its students do not often get the chance to experience — a masterclass that treated their creative ambitions as legitimate, professional, and worth taking seriously. Stagecraft brought Utsavi Bhatia Gera and her team in front of 110+ young performers with a clear mission: dismantle the quiet myth that the performing arts are a lesser calling, something to be pursued only after real career options have been exhausted.
From the outset, the session was structured to prove otherwise — treating performance as a discipline with its own rigour, career pathways, and professional legitimacy. Utsavi’s approach combined warmth with substance. She spoke about her own journey with an honesty that avoided both extremes students often encounter — neither the unrealistic glamorisation that leaves young performers unprepared for the actual work involved, nor the dismissiveness that discourages them before they have even started.
What emerged instead was a grounded, practical picture: what it takes to build a sustainable career in performing arts, the skills that matter beyond raw talent, and the persistence required to turn passion into profession. The open Q&A format gave the session its real texture. Students asked the questions that matter most at their age and stage — about training, about how to convince sceptical families, about what a realistic first step actually looks like. Utsavi and her team answered each with the specificity that only comes from having navigated these exact questions themselves, giving students guidance they could genuinely act on rather than genericencouragement to “follow their dreams.”
For FLO Lucknow, this masterclass represented an investment in a demographic the chapter does not always reach directly — young women and men at the very beginning of their creative journeys, standing at the point where mentorship can meaningfully shift the direction they choose to take. Bringing a genuine industry perspective into their academy at this formative stage gave 110+ students something rare: permission to take their own creative ambition seriously.