About the International Mentorship

From December 2020 to June 2021 Terry O’Connor, one of the members of Forced Entertainment, worked with five contemporary performing arts makers based in Ireland. This mentorship programme is a unique opportunity for performance makers to develop an early-stage idea, outside the pressures of production. The engagement of the mentor is aimed to pose challenges and offer interrogations within a supportive structure.

In addition to meeting Terry online, each of the participants received a bursary to help them dedicate time to work on their ideas, and we also offered travel subsidy to help them see relevant work internationally.

The Pan Pan International Mentorship is funded by the Arts Council. The Gate Theatre is the mentorship partner.

Mentor

Terry O'Connor is a core member and performer with Forced Entertainment, a collective practice of six artists based in Sheffield who received the 2016 International Ibsen Prize for contribution to theatre. 

Her work as an artist and performer is also replayed through a long history of working as a teacher, lecturer, mentor and collaborator with other artists. In 2009, she was awarded an AHRC Creative Fellowship at Roehampton University and in 2011 she was made Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance Practice at the University of Sheffield. 

In November 2016 she was awarded a Creative Fellowship as part of collaboration between the University of Birmingham, the RSC and the Shakespeare Institute. Her doctoral research practice at the University of Salford (2019-24) investigates experimental and improvisational process and collaborative aesthetics within contemporary performance. 

She is currently working on a number of participation projects to run alongside Forced Entertainment’s 2020 live streaming of Complete Works: Tabletop Shakespeare At Home.

For further information on Forced Entertainment, see www.forcedentertainment.com

Martha Knight is a sound designer and theatre artist from Dublin, interested in contemporary music cultures and technologies. She is the co-director of Tallaght-based collective Freshly Ground Theatre. Her work with them includes Ode to a Postcode (Dublin Fringe 2019 - nominated Best Ensemble), and Cruinniú na nÓg commissions Playhouse and Play Apart. She is currently in the development stage of SoloSIRENs’ upcoming production Cessair as sound designer and assistant producer, and is also developing a new creative sound/play app, At the Very Beginning, with the Civic’s Ready Steady Show! Festival. Other recent credits include the Abbey’s Young Curators programme, and performing as one half of new ensemble Crow Mountain with Sam Killian at the inaugural SoFFT Nights Festival.

During the Pan Pan International Mentorship, Martha will develop a folk concept album with a live performance element, investigating and mythologising the history of aerial photography in rural Irish homes, and our relationship with surveillance, the land, and the sky.

Eoghan Carrick is an independent theatre and opera maker working in Ireland and internationally. He works on new and established texts with a focus on innovative interpretations and interdisciplinary collaboration. Since 2018, he has been an associate director with Landmark Productions and Irish National Opera, and from 2015-19 was associate director with Corn Exchange Theatre Company. Recent directing credits include: Bodies of Water (Dublin Fringe Festival, 2019; Dublin Fringe Best Design Nomination), Midsummer (Project Arts Centre, 2019), Theatre For One (Cork Midsummer Festival, 2019; Irish Times Theatre Awards Nomination Best Ensemble), INFINITY (Dublin Fringe Festival, 2018; Dublin Fringe First Fortnight Award, Dublin Fringe Best Design Award, Dublin Fringe Best Performer Nomination).

Currently, he is working with Colin Murphy on the Abbey Theatre’s Fourteen Voices from the Bloodied Field, Deep Fake with Lauren Shannon Jones for Dublin Fringe 2021 and an audio presentation of about:blank with Adam Wyeth. Eoghan is on the steering group of the National Campaign for the Arts and a member of IETM, Theatre Forum, Dramaturg Network Ireland and the Irish Society of Stage and Screen Designers. For more info and future projects visit eoghancarrick.com 

During the Pan Pan International Mentorship, Eoghan will be exploring how ideas around illness and plague are transmitted now and historically.

Rachel Ní Bhraonáin works primarily as a dance artist, making multidisciplinary shows and short films. Her latest short film Marian was selected by AEMI to be screened at Gaze Film Festival 2020. Her show Losing Your Body won the Wild Card Award at Dublin Fringe Festival 2019 and was nominated for Best Performer, Best Production, the Judges’ Choice Award and an Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Movement Direction. She is a 2020 Dublin Fringe Resident Artist, a Gap Day Artist and recipient of a Dance Bursary Award. You can learn more at https://www.rachelnibhraonain.com/

For the Pan Pan International Mentorship Rachel will be working on a new piece for stage and screen that centres around moshing, heavy metal, community and chaos.

Ben Kidd is a director, dramaturg and writer, and co-Artistic Director of Dead Centre. He has co-directed all Dead Centre projects, including To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), The Interpretation of Dreams, Beckett’s Room, Hamnet, Chekhov’s First Play, LIPPY and Souvenir. Outside of Dead Centre, he has directed work for Headlong, the Gate Theatre (London) and the Young Vic. You can learn more about Dead Centre at www.deadcentre.org

During the Pan Pan International Mentorship Ben will be researching representations of illness, how to work with and make material from real peoples’ testimony, and how to adapt non-fiction books.

Vicky Langan is a Cork-based artist from Tuam whose practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly sound, performance and film. Langan both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate territory loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. Close recordings of the natural world, intimate sounds from daily life, emotional unearthing and a disturbance of surfaces are all explored as a temporal space where the material body and sensual inner worlds mesh. She is affiliated with Experimental Film Society, a company dedicated to the creation of uncompromisingly personal, formally challenging filmmaking. Langan’s decade-long filmmaking partnership with filmmaker and critic Maximilian Le Cain has resulted in screenings and retrospectives of their work having been shown throughout the world. Their work is part of the Arts Council of Ireland’s national collection. Langan is a recipient of a 2019 Next Generation Artists Award, as well as bursary awards from the Arts Council of Ireland and Music Network. Vicky was a participant of the Next Stage 2019 in partnership with Dublin Theatre Festival and Theatre Forum, and has received mentorship from Gare St Lazare in partnership with The Everyman, Cork. She is responsible for Programming and Special Projects for Open Ear festival on Sherkin Island. You can learn more at www.vickylangan.com

During the Pan Pan mentorship, Vicky will be developing a multidisciplinary response to the 1935 anti-fascist science fiction novel Land Under England, written by neglected Tuam author Joseph O’Neill.