About the International Mentorship

Thanks to a grant from the Arts Council of Ireland, Pan Pan engaged Tim Crouch, theatre maker, writer and performer, to work as a mentor with five local artists developing early-stage ideas for performance projects.

In addition to having a series of engagements with Tim, each of the five selected projects received a bursary to help the artists dedicate time to working on their ideas. This year the participants worked with Tim over four visits and for the first time we were able to offer a small amount of travel subsidy to help participants to see relevant work internationally.

Mentor

Tim Crouch is a UK theatre artist based in Brighton. He writes plays, performs in them and takes responsibility for their production. He started to make his own work in 2003. Tim was an actor for many years before starting to write – and he still performs in much of his work.

Tim works with a number of associates and collaborators to produce his writing. There isn’t a company structure; things and people are brought together when they are needed. The starting process has always been a text written by Crouch. Early work was made in response to a self-generated impulse to tell a story or explore a form. This impulse is still the first motivation but, lately, it’s become slightly more formalized through the involvement of various commissioning theatres and organizations.

His plays include My Arm, ENGLAND (a play for galleries), the OBIE award winning An Oak Tree, The Author, Adler & Gibb and (with Andy Smith) what happens to the hope at the end of the evening. Tim tours his work nationally and internationally. He also writes for younger audiences. A series of plays inspired by Shakespeare’s lesser characters includes I, Malvolio. For the RSC Tim has directed The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear and I, Cinna (the poet) – all for young audiences. Tim is published by Oberon Books.

www.timcrouchtheatre.co.uk

Participants

Amy Conroy – performer, writer and artistic director of HotForTheatre, will develop new piece of theatre that explores the altered realities of psychosis in dementia, from inside and outside.

Paul Curley – A performer and theatre maker, often working with young audiences. By finding parallels and tangents between Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and the life of his 85 year old aunt who is a nun, the ambition is to explode ideas and to reassemble the pieces in search of a new theatre performance for audiences young and old.

Kate Heffernan – a writer investigating Montague: a former hotel on the outskirts of her hometown, where her parents celebrated their wedding reception, and which is now operated by the Reception and Integration Agency (as a Direct Provision centre for asylum seekers)

Hilary O’Shaughnessy – a performance maker who likes mixing theatre and technology. She will work to develop a new performance piece, Hilfest, about failure and the sometimes twisted entertainment value of effort and collaboration.