About the International Mentorship

Thanks to a grant from the Arts Council’s Theatre Artist Development Scheme, Pan Pan engaged Stewart Laing, director and designer for theatre and opera, and Artistic Director of Untitled Projects to work as a mentor with theatre and performance makers based in Ireland to develop early-stage projects.

‘Untitled Projects makes ambitious and adventurous theatre on a large scale. We embrace taking risks, and in doing so we surprise and challenge our audience. We continually re-imagine what theatre can be: blending landscape, biography, 
novel, video, lecture, documentary, installation, interview, fashion, music, science and playwriting. Rooted in Scotland, we pride ourselves in a far-reaching international outlook.’

The main focus of the International Mentorship and Bursary Programme is for theatre and performance makers to buy time to work on an idea in its early development stages, outside of the pressures of production. In addition to having four meetings with Stewart in Dublin, each of the five selected participants receive a bursary to help them set aside dedicated time to work on their ideas. We also offer some travel subsidy to help them see relevant work internationally. The engagement of the mentor is aimed to pose challenges and interrogations to the ideas in development within a supportive structure.

This was the fourth year of the International Mentorship Programme, which Pan Pan initiated in 2012. Previous mentors were Kirsten Delholm of Hotel Pro Forma, Viviane De Muynck of Needcompany and Tim Crouch. The programme is a way of re-engaging with the legacy of the Dublin International Theatre Symposium that Pan Pan ran from 1997-2001 – an event where theatre and performance makers were at the core, and engaging and learning from each other was a key focus.

Mentor

Stewart Laing is Associate Director with National Theatre of Scotland and is Artistic Director of Untitled Projects, which he formed in 1998. Directing credits with Untitled Projects include: J.G. Ballard Project, blind_sight, Slope, An Argument About Sex, The Salon Project, Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Slope Redux. Further credits include: The Maids (Citizens Theatre); Ten Plagues (Traverse Theatre); Les Parents Terribles, Titus Andronicus (Dundee Rep); The Sewing Group (Royal Court); Creditors (Lyceum). Opera includes: La bohème, Così fan tutte (Scottish Opera); The Breasts of Tiresias and L’Heure espagnole (Grange Park Opera); Tosca (NorrlandsOperan); La fanciulla del West, Faust, Dead Man Walking (Malmö Opera). Stewart originally trained as a theatre designer at Central School of Art and Design and has designed throughout the UK, internationally and for the West End and Broadway, winning a Tony Award in 1997 for the musical Titanic.

Participants

Tom Creed is a theatre and opera director based in Dublin. From 2011 to 2013 he was Festival Director of Cork Midsummer Festival, and was nominated for an Irish Times Irish Theatre Award in 2012 “for original and dynamic use of local spaces at Cork Midsummer Festival”.

Recent productions include Private View at Vlaamse Opera, Operadagen Rotterdam, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg and on tour in Europe,

The Human Voice and Susanna’s Secret for Opera Theatre Company at Kilkenny Arts Festival and on tour in Ireland, Suor Angelica, Mavra and Renard for the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and Buddleia, O Go My Man and Into the Woods for the Lir.

In 2016 he will direct Britten’s Owen Wingrave for the Paris Opera Academy, Donnacha Dennehy’s new music theatre piece The Hunger at BAM in New York and Opera Theatre of St Louis, Die Zauberflöte for the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and Stravinsky’s Mavra and Walton’s The Bear for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

As part of the Pan Pan International Mentorship programme, Tom will develop One Day: a twenty-four-hour long stage production of James Joyce’s Ulysses, following the timeline of the novel and proposing a demanding commitment and deep immersion for actors and audience alike.

Clodagh Deegan has been working in Costume for about twenty years. She initially worked in Film & TV on productions including The Butcher Boy, Angela’s Ashes and Lenny Abrahamson’s Prosperity.

More recently she has worked in Theatre and Opera, working as assistant on the Abbey Theatre’s Death of a Reluctant Tyrant, supervising Glengarry Glen Ross in the Gate Theatre and Wide Open Opera’s production of Nixon in China at the Bord Gais Energy Theatre.

Clodagh designed costumes for Wide Open Opera’s Things we Throw Away, and The Oldest Woman in Limerick. In 2015 she supervised Opera Theatre Company’s touring production of Rigoletto and designed the Irish section of Danish film, Birds Across the Strait.

For Pan Pan’s International Mentorship programme, Clodagh will work to write and design a play about finding or making a space for ones’ self.

Ruairí Donovan’s work sits at the intersection of dance, theatre and live art where he aims to offer dramaturgies of participation during live performance.

Ruairí has been making dances in Ireland since 2008. He is from County Cork and his practice is concerned with ‘the need for roots’ and queering representations of the dancing body.

Ruairí’s work has been presented extensively at home and abroad in Europe and the USA. He has performed for Mårten Spångberg, toured internationally with Keith Hennessy and TURBULENCE (a dance about the economy) since 2011 and is engaged in an ongoing research with collaborator Siriol Joyner (Cmyru). He recently performed a solo dance for 30,000 people with Arcade Fire and his work ZOMBIES; why death is dying or are you working hard enough? received the Judges Choice award at the Tiger Dublin Fringe Festival 2014.

For Pan Pan’s International Mentorship programme, Ruairí will work to develop a new performance piece, SOLDIERS, about failure and identity in the context of the Irish 1916 Centenary. The performance would occur on Sheares Street, in Cork City; the site of the Volunteer Hall where in 1916 approximately 1000 men gathered under Thomás Mac Curtain only to be sent home after contradictory messages from Dublin.

Meadhbh Haicéid’s work in performance includes playwriting, directing, story-telling and stand-up comedy. She is a founding member of Waterdonkey Theatre Company, with whom she has directed many devised productions including Home (Collaborations, 2015) and the 12-hour Happening (Dublin Fringe Festival, 2011; Cork Solstice, 2011) which both involved live improvisation within a rule-based structure. Her play A Different Animal, produced by Wildebeest, was nominated for the Spirit of the Fringe Award for Writing at Limerick Unfringed (2011). In 2015, Meadhbh presented the experiment in collective spontaneity Chaos (or ‘It Loves to Happen’) at THE THEATRE MACHINE TURNS YOU ON 4 – THE JAM SESSIONS and Quarter Block Party, Cork. Previous solo work also includes one-woman show MADONNA which Meadhbh wrote and performed (Dublin Fringe Festival 2013; THEATRE MACHINE Vol. 3, 2013; W.I.P Cork Solstice, 2012).

For Pan Pan’s International Mentorship programme, Meadhbh plans to write a script that interrogates the processes of commemoration and forgetting through the lens of the historic relationship between Belgium and the Congo.

Conor Hanratty is a theatre and opera director. Recent projects include a revival of Francesca Zambello’s production of Madame Butterfly at Opera San Antonio, Trouble in Tahiti at the Glimmerglass Festival, Maria de Buenos Aires at Cork Opera House, various ShortWorks at the Wexford Festival Opera and two sets of Opera Briefs for the Lir and the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Recent theatre projects include Noelle Brown and Michele Forbes’ POSTSCRIPT (Fringe Festival, national tour and at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris), and Romeo and Juliet (Second Age). He trained at UCLA, the National Theatre Directors’ Course and on Rough Magic’s SEEDS programme in 2006-2007. He has an MA in Greek Theatre Performance from the University of London.

Conor founded Ulysses Opera Theatre with Tom Lane and Matthew Smyth to produce Lane’s FLATPACK for the Fringe Festival in 2012, and they followed this with HARP | A River Cantata, an outdoor spectacular on the Samuel Beckett Bridge for the Fringe in 2014. He also co-founded TEXT|messages in 2011, as a platform for directors to experiment with short pieces of Shakespeare. The group created an outreach project called Be Not Afraid of Greatness for the Abbey Theatre in 2014.

For Pan Pan’s International Mentorship programme, Conor is working on a translation of Aeschylus’ play The Persians in a new translation into Irish by poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. The project will juxtapose the set pieces of Greek tragedy and Irish poetry, looking at mourning, language and national identity.