Mentoring

Mentoring

Curious have worked with a range of student and professional artists in the UK and internationally creating bespoke mentoring programs that can include studio visits, dramaturgy, advice in applying for grants or graduate courses, portfolio development and professional networking. If you are interested in a discussion about mentoring, and/or advice about framing this as part of a grant application, please contact us – curious@curiousperformance.com.

Curious have worked with many wonderful artists and organizations such as FrenchMottershead, Breathe, and Natasha Davis and have served several times as mentors at East End Collaborations. Curious also served as regional mentors to Live Art Collective East, an artist-led collective they helped establish in 2009 to promote and support Live Art and live artists across the Eastern Region.

Current Clients include Rachel Mars and Xavier de Sousa.

Rachel Mars
I first met Curious and their brilliant work on the fantastic Autobiology workshop, which was a catalyst for my first solo piece in 2009, so I feel their guidance and influence has been vital for my work since the very beginning. Last year I asked them to be mentors as I started to think about a new large-scale project – FORGE, which examines memorial sites, propriety and inherited identities. I was also at a point in my career where after 8 years of making work I was quite exhausted. I was seeking support and advice from people who had stayed in the performance sector so successfully and I turned to Helen and Leslie with their diverse performance, writing and academic practice. The mentoring so far has been vital – they have alerted to me to new texts, thinkers and ways of considering diverse possible outcomes for the project, and also been enormously generous and supportive in guiding me as I figure out how to make this a sustainable long-term career. You can see more about what I’m up to at rachelmars.org.

Xavier de Sousa
My performance practice explores personal and political heritage within the context of mainstream discourse on national identity, nationalism and migration. I asked Curious to work with me as mentors on TIME/COLONIA, a new performance piece, investigating the effects of language in process of adaptation to new contexts. Currently in the research and development stages, the piece is a collective experimentation with turning the theatre space into its own ecology, in collaboration with local artists and migrant communities. Curious have such an interesting take on sensitivity on dramatic language within their work, both aesthetically and intentionally. Alongside this, the work they do with migrant and refugee artists is awe-inspiring. It has been an eye-opening experience and I believe it will help me grow both as an artist and a human being. You can read more about TIME/COLONIA, commissioned by Barbican and Project Arts Centre (Dublin) at: www.xavierdesousa.co.uk