Open Call PoPMoves UK Mentorship Program: Mentors 2024

Open Call | PoPMoves UK Mentorship Program: Mentors 2024 In partnership with Kingston University London: Kingston School of Art; and PACE: Performing Arts Community Engagement, are seeking mentors to join the PoPMoves UK Mentorship Program 2024.

What is the PoPMoves Mentorship Program?

We have developed the PoPMoves Mentorship Program in response to calls from within the PoPMoves community for more mentorship opportunities. We are excited to be launching our pilot program in 2024 in partnership with Performing Arts Community Engagement, Kingston University. Our approach to pairing Mentors and Mentees is not about age, professional rank, or years of experience, but about creating pairings that match skills-searching-for with skills-offered. The program is part of PoPMoves overall mission to effect change in the world through popular dance. The Mentorship Program forwards this mission by supporting the popular dance community with compassion and collective care.

Who are Mentors and Mentees?

Mentors are people who can offer strategies for navigating the UK dance-sector and academia from a popular dance perspective. Mentees will be popular dance practitioners, students and researchers seeking the skills to work with institutions, secure funding, and develop research pathways. We hope to facilitate pairings that support mentees seeking to develop popular dance projects. These projects may or may not include text-based scholarly outputs. They may also be creative practice, oral history, documentation, ethnographic, or community-led methods. What is Mentorship? Mentorship consists of a total of 3 hours of conversations and strategizing. Each pairing can decide on their own schedule and combination of in-person and online meetings. Pairings may decide to share meeting times with other Mentor-Mentee pairs based on common interests. We hope that each cohort of Mentees will continually grow a peer-support community serving as a springboard for future collaborations and projects; that eventually Mentees will see themselves also as Mentors.

Mentorship conversations may address:

• Finding and securing institutional funding.

• Creating project management strategies.

• Moving towards publication, and alternative forms of publication.

• Interacting with hierarchies that underestimate popular dance practice and research.

• Ways to develop long term professional networking and career strategies.

• Keeping one’s own ‘voice’ while interacting with institutional languages and vocabularies.

Essential skills required of mentors:

• Coaching approach to mentoring/ non-hierarchical approach to knowledge exchange.

• Experience in either academic or popular dance spaces (or both).

• Can provide access to resources ('resources' include networks, tools to gain access)

• For our inaugural year, we are focused on UK-based practitioners, but we are open to discussing international pairings. Desired skills offered by mentors:

• Familiarity with institutional structures and how to navigate them (universities, academic conferences, funding organisations).

• Familiarity with academic and non-academic dance spaces. Mentors may have experience /familiarity weighted more towards academia or popular dance spaces.

Mentors will be offered an honorarium of £100. Application form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScyVa8d6kMdu2SWyqE0mOghIO5dJDcm7TxORsXYXCXacv-HDw/viewform