Mentoring with Curious

I asked ‘Curious’ artists Leslie Hill and Helen Paris if they would be able to mentor me as part of this project.

I met Helen and Leslie last year when I participated in an Artists Retreat organised by Colchester Arts Centre. Curious were running the retreat as a chance for eastern region artists to network, discuss, support, collaborate, seek new opportunities and enjoy being in a luxurious hotel!

I found the weekend to be extremely valuable to my practice and was keen to work with Helen and Leslie again. For this project, I was seeking mentoring from a practicing artist that I could have an ongoing dialogue with and who could give my work an outside eye. It was important that at least one of the mentors had some notion of my work beforehand, and the other (Wendy Houstoun) was new to it.

With their experience of mentoring as well as practicing artists producing performance, installation and film, I felt that Curious could offer an informed contribution to this project and looked forward to arranging some mentoring sessions and dialoguing with them over the course of the year. I’m glad that they said ‘Yes’!

Recently I have been working a lot on collaborative work which has been really exciting but I do sometimes allow my solo practice to get bit slapdash and squeezed between other things. The outside eye in particular is something that I feel my solo work lacks. Most of my performances are fairly short and I grapple with the idea of extending them or choosing one to further develop. They are also often site-specific, created for a specific location and in some cases, a specific event. I was keen to talk to Helen and Leslie (who have worked site-specifically) about how to develop a performance beyond its initial purpose. Which piece could I broaden and move to a new site, which piece could work in a theatre venue?

Prior to meeting up, I emailed Helen and Leslie to explain that I was going to show them a ‘Marathon of Mini Performances’ (short ones and snippets from longer ones) in the hope that by showing a number of mini quickfire pieces, they and I will have a clearer idea of what my work is and where it might go?!

We met in Ipswich again, at the same hotel where the retreat had been held the following year. I presented Helen and Leslie with an artist’s statement and a small blurb about each of the pieces they were about to see:

‘Private Joke’
joking and despairing about falling (over, up, down, out, to, behind, again)

PROPS: one pile of clothes including a hat, one bunch of bananas, five separate bananas, one banana skin, a pair of glasses

'Twice Cooked'
Giving and receiving nourishment on the line between caring and over-sugaring. A broad knowledge of biscuit brands, mouth to mouth resuscitation, the quintessentially english tradition of talking to a plant and the more unusual practice of digesting a shoe.

PROPS: a small plant, shoe, dinner plate, napkin, salt and pepper, teapot with tea, apron, sharp knife, meat prod

‘The Eleven Home Stretch’
A spoken out loud list of all my previous addresses. I am recreating memory lane using kitchen tiles and short ambiguous anecdotes.

PROPS: 11 kitchen tiles, bucket of water

‘Conskirtina’
Virtuosic legwork and precise muscle control create a unique serenade for the cafe diner or anyone who wants to tune in. Holly Bodmer is a performance artist that can turn Beethoven on…with her thigh.

PROPS: Big Black Skirt, Children's Casio Keyboard, cd player and cd recording of a failed music exam, Book of Beethoven's Sonatas

In the corner of the room on a table I laid out all the props for each of the performances. Together they looked like a peculiar assortment. To me they are all familiar, well used objects that trigger memories (ones I have worked with before). But it was unusual to have them all next to each other at the same time. Every piece of work I’d done was merged together on the table, yet able to fit quite neatly side by side. Suddenly it didn’t feel like I had done very much at all, and I wondered if the word ‘marathon’ was a tad hopeful.

I was wrong, it felt like a marathon. I performed for three and half hours, briefly stopping between pieces to have a conversation with Helen and Leslie, or asking them to leave the room for 5 minutes while I hid a keyboard under my skirt. Performing in a succession of mini performances and as a race against time only emphasized the slapdash nature, but it was a fun way bringing a lot of ideas to light and sifting the strong bits from the weaker bits. It provided a useful starting point, crafted an energetic level of productivity which continued through our dialogue and enabled me to ‘get a lot of my chest’ so to speak.

I felt able to talk to Helen and Leslie in detail about each of the pieces and it was useful to hear their initial responses at the moment of seeing the work and then at the end in a half hour discussion about my overall practice, where each piece had more of a context to it. As a company made up of two people I was actually being provided with two opinions and two or specifically four outside eyes! Which I appreciate!

Curious gave me a lot of practical tips and professional developmental advice on my overall practice and 'outside eye' feedback on specific performances. I came away with a pageful of notes about what moments worked, what bits to extend, a lot about placing, specific images that were conjured up or memories revealed, bits to wire up, bits to go for it, bits to abandon, silences, overcrowding, eye contact, spit, repetition, music teachers, Englishness, madness, female stand-ups, speaking with an accent, cabaret, and doing a bigger show.