Open Call PoPMoves UK Mentorship Program: Mentees 2024

Kingston University London, in partnership with Kingston School of Art and PACE: Performing Arts Community Engagement, are seeking mentees to join the PoPMoves UK Mentorship Program 2024.

Application form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc5usE6NkqIw6Uv35APlMgPld_1q0-pLsLuc8LOVuhFnKH9LQ/viewform

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?

Mentees might be prospective popular dance students (BA, MA or PhD level), graduates, early-career academics or popular dance practitioners. They might also be more established researchers or artists looking to improve their skills, take on leadership roles or make a pivot. Mentors are people who can offer strategies for navigating the UK dance-sector and academia from a popular dance perspective. 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.

Applications close 17 April.