Sadler’s Wells announces artist development schemes including mentorship programme with renowned choreographers

Sadler’s Wells today opens its artist development schemes for 2025/26 providing artists with opportunities to experiment, explore, and develop their practice. The three programmes have creative innovation and artistic collaboration at their heart and aim to help fuel the evolution of dance by connecting people and ideas.

Sadler's Wells Mentoring Programme will see eight established choreographers from Sadler’s Wells network provide six hour-long mentoring sessions across the year to emerging artists looking to develop their own practice. The choreographers, representing a wide range of dance syles, who will provide the sessions are Marc Brew, Akeim Toussaint Buck, Oona Doherty, Trajal Harrell, Dannielle “Rhimes” LeCointe, Takeshi Matsumoto, Alesandra Seutin and Georgia Tegou. Mentees will be selected by open call where they will share a specific creative question, idea, or provocation that they would like to explore with a mentor. 

The Disabled Artists Programme is a monthly programme of practice-based and support sessions for artists who identify as disabled. By holding a consistent space for the disabled dance community, Sadler’s Wells hopes to cultivate deeper relationships and help support the development of disabled dance makers, providing a broad range of choreographic experiences. Over the course of the year on alternating months artists will receive a  practice-based session led by an invited guest choreographer or an Artist-Led Support Session led by the Sadlers Wells Artist Development team. The guest choreographers for the practice-based sessions will be led by Cathy Waller,  Jade Hackett, Raquel Meseguer and Jo Fong.

Our bi-monthly Artist-Led Sessions create space for artists and creatives to devise a session for the artistic community to facilitate skills, ideas, and resource sharing. Sadler’s Wells will pay a fee for the planning and delivery of the session, provide space at Sadler’s Wells and producing support to realise the session. The sessions will be selected by open call where we ask artists and creatives to tell us about their creative practice and describe the session that they would like to deliver. Each session will be free to attend and advertised on the Open Sessions section of our website. All sessions will be free and with hybrid delivery so artist outside of London are able to attend. The deadline to apply to be part of the Mentoring Programme and to submit a proposal for the Artist-Led Sessions is 31 August.

Rob Jones, Associate Artistic Director at Sadler’s Wells, said: "Creative innovation and artistic collaboration is at the heart of what we do here at Sadler’s Wells so we’re delighted to be able to reopen our Artist Development schemes for 2025/2026. Our programmes are made to connect ideas and people, offer advice and support, and help nurture and develop artists - and hopefully, develop the artform, pushing it in new and unexpected ways. We're excited for this next wave of programmes to connect with developing choreographers.”