About the International Mentorship

From January to June 2022 Terry O’Connor, one of the members of Forced Entertainment, worked with five contemporary performing arts makers based in Ireland. This was the second year that Terry was mentor for this programme, and we were delighted to have her back after a fully-online mentorship in 2021. 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 in person and online, each of the participants received a bursary to help them dedicate time to work on their ideas, and were also offer 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.

“The mentorship gave me confidence in myself and in the idea. It was a comfortable place for testing out ideas on someone whose honesty I could trust, and as a fledgling maker that has led to growth in my way of thinking and working."

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. She has performed with Meg Stuart, Tim Crouch, Invisible Flock and Jerome Bel.

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.

She was awarded an AHRC Creative Fellow at Roehampton University in 2009, made Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance Practice at the University of Sheffield in 2011 and was a Creative Fellow at the University of Birmingham, the RSC and the Shakespeare Institute in 2016-17.

Her current doctoral research at the University of Salford investigates improvisational process. She is currently also working with Imogen Ashby on Subject to Change, a Paul Hamlyn funded evaluation of Forced Entertainment’s participation methodology.

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

Participants

Colm Summers is an Irish theatre and opera director based between New York and Dublin. He is a playwright and essayist, and has worked with Milo Rau, Raja Feather Kelly, and the Wooster Group. Recent work includes: love is hard and definitely (probably) worth it by Johnny Lloyd at Clubbed Thumb and WEDNESDAY by the feath3r theory at New York Live Arts, both New York. Coming up: The Inheritance by Matthew Lopez at the Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles in 2022.

For the Pan Pan International Mentorship Colm will develop When David Buckel Saved the World, an alternative history of the future - in which we save the planet - based on the life of activist David Buckel.

Gea Gojak is a theatre director and actress born in Pula, Croatia. She finished BA in Acting and Puppetry at The Academy of Arts in Osijek, Croatia, and MA of Acting at Art Academy Novi Sad, Serbia. As an actress, she worked in theatre, on film and television.

Several years ago Gea transferred her focus of interest to theatre directing, mostly dealing with socio-political topics. In prominent theatres of Croatia and Serbia, she produced engaged performances and participative projects that raise questions, stimulate and encourage critical thinking, activation and development of the audience.

Since coming to Dublin in 2019, Gea proceeded with her professional artistic development. For her theatre practice she received the following awards: AIC Bursary Award 2021 Collaborative Arts and Cultural Diversity, Create and Fire Station Artist’s Studio 2021 Residency Award, “Playground”- Best theatre performance Jauno Teatro Dienos festival, Lithuania, “Misfit” Istrian National Theatre - Best theatre performance International festival Leone D’oro, Croatia, “Education theatre” Serbian National Theatre - Erste Bank award for best socially beneficial projects (Serbia).

During the Pan Pan International Mentorship Gea will research how to establish theatre language utilising archive material (photography and film), actors and non-actors that share the stage. The idea of a choir as a voice of the nation, personal story, history of country and language that is not familiar to the Irish audience, with the aim of creating a compelling, universal story.

Mai Ishikawa is a US-born Japanese theatre translator and a former dancer/actor, now based in Dublin. She moved to Ireland from Tokyo in 2019 and married an Irishman. She graduated from acting school United Performers’ Studio in Tokyo and performed in Festival d'Avignon, KYOTO EXPERMIENT and World Puppet Theatre Festival Bangkok. She also taught tap dancing at Kaz Tap Studio. She has translated “Necessary Targets” by Eve Ensler, “A Christmas Carol” by John Mortimer, “Once Upon a Bridge” by Sonya Kelly, “Cyprus Avenue” by David Ireland and other plays. She has interpreted for numerous international theatre-makers, voice- and acting coaches and choreographers from Irael, Colombia, France, Britain and the US. She is a member of the Japanese Centre of International Theatre Institute, and Tokyo theatre group Ova9, where veteran actors and directors devise theatre for women.  

Mai will explore the connection between the creativity within us and motherhood with a little nod to verbatim theatre, while following a woman with low self-esteem, who cannot believe in her own story, about to give birth, on the bullet train, towards the only “baby hatch” in Japan.

Patrick Scullion/Rosa Tralee is a writer, performer, retail worker, and local headbanger from Belfast. Rosa's shows ask the Queer, Irish imagination for answers on living in the age of surveillance capitalism; instrumentarian power, and epistemic chaos. Rosa Tralee has performed at Dublin Fringe Festival 2020: Pilot Light Edition; served as Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2020's Artist-In-Residence, and is currently featured in Array Artist Collective's Turner Prize-nominated installation, 'An Druithaib's Ball', showing in the Herbert Gallery in Coventry.

Supported by the Pan Pan International Mentorship Patrick hopes to create a visual album supported by live performance dedicated to friendships which transcend space, time and reality.

Shanna May Breenis a performance artist inspired by the inter-contextualization of art and science, her practice centres around creating experiences that look at our human impact on the environment.

Previous works have seen her creating a micro glacier out of ice, walking through Iceland to develop a show about ‘journey’ and composing a travelling soundscape on board a coastal train. Shanna recently planted 1,000 indigenous Irish trees in her hometown of Birr, Co. Offaly while making her latest project Root which premiered as part of Dublin Theatre Festival in 2021. 

Shanna completed her MA in ATP Scenography at The Royal Central School of Speech & Drama in 2014 and her BA in Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Art in 2011. Most recently Shanna studied a postgraduate diploma in Climate Entrepreneurship at Trinity College Dublin.

For the Pan Pan International Mentorship, Shanna will be developing a new work that will examine what it is to make performance for place rather than people.