Theatre Forum is now Performing Arts Forum

MAKE is an artist development programme and residency initiative of Cork Midsummer Festival, Dublin Fringe Festival, Project Arts Centre and Theatre Forum. It is open to Irish and international artists for the purpose of generating new performance work outside of the traditional writer-led model at all career levels.

The 14th MAKE residency will run from Sunday 13th – Friday 18th November 2022, and will be located in the town of Birr, County Offaly.

MAKE 2022 MENTORS

Gundega Laivina, Mojca Jug and Tom Creed.

MAKE 2022 PARTICIPANTS

Working individually:
Alice Malseed, Andrea Williams, Candy Warhol, David McGovern, Gea Gojak, Grace Kiely, Hugh Farell, Jenni Nikinmaa, Maia Nunes, Sarah Devereux, Tom Moran.

Working jointly: Alessandra Azevedo and Angela Domingos Peres, Gina Donnelly and Seón Simpson.

MAKE 2022 Group

Alice Malseed

Alice Malseed

Alice is a theatre-maker based in Belfast. Her work has appeared across the UK, Ireland, in Sri Lanka and New York. In spring 2022 her play The Half Moon, directed by Emily Foran and produced by Green Shoot Productions was produced at the MAC and for a community tour in Belfast. Her show ‘Anthem was a hit at Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival 2021. Alice’s monologue Haven was part of 1st Origins Irish Festival in New York, and recorded by the Lyric Theatre for their ‘Listen at the Lyric’ series in Autumn 2020 – the show was New York Times’ Critic’s Pick in January 2021. Her show Jade City was at Bunker Theatre in London in September 2019, produced by View From Here Theatre Company.Alice was part of BBC WritersRoom Belfast Voices group 2018-2019 and Lyric New Playwrights Programme 2018. She is currently under commission with Bruiser Theatre Company to create a contemporary adaptation of Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht. Alice was awarded a Jerwood New Work Fund in and the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival Theatre Award.

Alessandra Azevedo

Alessandra Azevedo

Alessandra Azevedo is an Afro-Brazilian dancer, Capoeira performer & instructor from Salvador, Bahia – home to the largest African diaspora population & Afro-Brazilian culture. Her practice is rooted in body movement to promote connections and cultural education. Since moving to Ireland in 2015 she has established herself as an ambassador of the Afro-Brazilian culture in Ireland, working with Catherine Young, John Scott, Vivian Brodie Hayes, Justine Doswell & more and other artists since coming to Ireland. Along with her dance group Criola Dance, Alessandra has performed at major festivals sharing styles from the range of African diaspora dances developed through ancestral, artistic expression.www.alessandradancer.com

Andrea Williams

Andrea Williams

Andrea Williams is a Multidisciplinary Artist from Cape Verde who has been living in Ireland for More than a decade. Coming from a multi diverse culture she was greatly influenced by many art forms, such as music, dance, film and visual arts.

Since being in Ireland she has worked as a Dancer, Actor, Performer, Costume Designer, Stylist and Director.

Her most recent Theater work was as a performer for Hive City Legacy at the Dublin Fringe Festival 2022 as well as Director for WIP piece entitled EPG (Exploitation, Power, Greed) presented at the Theatre Forum Conference in Cork with Music Artist Olympio.

She has worked with names such as Ed Sheeran, Denise Chaila, Burnaboy, Loah, Tolu Makay and FeliSpeaks and last year in October she launched her first MultiMedia Exhibition at St. Peters Gallery in Cork called Undefined where she explored questions of Identity and her own Heritage.

Angela Domingos Peres

Angela Domingos Peres

Angela Domingos Peres is a researcher, actress and writer who found in staging a path of power to weave knowledge and poetize realities by relating Anthropology and Art. PhD and master in Social Anthropology and bachelor in Social Sciences, is activist of the anti-racist struggle. She guides her search for freedom in epistemological, aesthetic and practical terms. Author of “Anja – Quando me fiz inteira” (when made me whole) , theatre solo and book which focus is the intersections of gender, race and class experiences. She is developing a documentary about capoeira and a screenplay for a feature film. For the stage, she is currently dedicated to investigate decolonial languages and proposals.

Candy Warhol

Candy Warhol

Hailing from Cork City, Candy Warhol has been one of Ireland’s most renowned drag acts for over a decade. A descendant of legendary drag phenomenon Danny La Rue, Candy is the host and producer of Mockie Ah, Ireland’s leading Drag Haus. Formed in 2017 as a response to the lack of queer spaces in Cork, the Haus has gone from strength to strength with nationwide sell-out shows, national music festival appearances and television specials including an acclaimed RTÉ documentary – Kin Of Kweens. In 2022 Candy appeared on BBC One’s The Travel Show to speak about Mockie Ah after it was named one of Ireland’s top attractions.

Candy has been co-presenting Comedy Central’s Dragony Aunts since 2019 along with hosting and producing Friends Of Dorothy – Ireland’s No.1 queer podcast. Now in its third season, the show has boasted an array of renowned names including Rose McGowan, Sandra Bernhard, Siobhán McSweeney and Peaches along with Drag Race and Real Housewives all-stars. An international act, Candy hosts regular shows in the UK and has performed across America and Europe, most notably hosting Warsaw Pride to an audience of 50,000. Dividing her time between Ireland and London, she recently launched Gaylí – a new Irish queer cabaret in The Glory with her drag sister Marian Mary The 6th. The duo recently made their Fringe Festival debut this year in Dublin with Candy’s first play –The Wind That Shakes The Wig. Outside of drag, Candy is also the editor of Dreaming – Ireland’s premier queer arts and culture magazine.

David Mcgovern

David McGovern

David McGovern is an interdisciplinary artist with a socially engaged practice. He works with moving image, audio, performance and text to create space for self-enquiry, reflection and speculation. He is passionate in exploring what is common in our experiences, even if that commonality is ambiguous and niche. Themes in his work include masculinity, memory, being stuck, care, and queer identity. His background in futurism informs work that strives to reimagine what’s ahead of us.

David is currently developing new work entitled ‘HARD CARE’. This participatory artwork explores unconventional experiences of care, working towards crip, queer and feminist futures. In 2021, David began working on What Does He Need?, a project by artist Fiona Whelan, Brokentalkers and Rialto Youth Project, exploring how men and boys are shaped by and influence the world they live in. In 2022, David was awarded the Arts Council’s Next Generation Award. He is a member of A4 Sounds Artist Studio.

https://davidm.tv

https://hardcare.net

Gea Gojak 2

Gea Gojak

Gea Gojak is a theatre director and actress born in Pula, Croatia. She finished her BA in Acting and Puppetry at The Academy of Arts in Croatia, and her MA in Acting at the Art Academy in Serbia. As an actress, she worked in theatres, in films, and on television.

Several years ago Gea transferred her focus of interest to theatre directing. In prominent theatres in Croatia and Serbia, she produced engaged performances and projects that raise questions and encourage critical thinking, activation, and development of the audience.

In 2019 Gea moved to Ireland and proceeded with her artistic development. She received the following awards and residencies: AIC Bursary Award 2021 Collaborative Arts and Cultural Diversity, Create and Fire Station Artist’s Studio 2021 Award, 9th Pan Pan International Mentorship, Next Stage 2022, Activate Residency- Backstage Theatre 2022, Forecast- A School of Thinking 202, etc.

In 2022, Gea started a collaboration with the Mother Tongues Festival as a producer and creator of the programme. Currently, Gea is a resident director at the Abbey Theatre.

 

Gina Donnelly

Gina Donnelly

Gina is a Belfast based Theatre Maker. She works as a playwright, producer, stage manager and director. Her work as a playwright has achieved great recognition both in Ireland and internationally. Her work regularly focuses on social issues such as abortion access (‘Tea’) and hidden homelessness (‘Ice Cream’). Her piece ‘Maybe If We’d Stayed Angry’ was commissioned for the Origins First Irish Festival in New York. The monologue was heavily praised in the New York Times for its ‘quiet magnificence’. She also creates under the partnership SkelpieLimmer with Seón Simpson, who work under the concept that ‘serious theatre doesn’t have to feel serious’. Their multi-award winning show Two Fingers Up was a hit of the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe being named by Stage UK as One of the Best Shows of the Fringe.

Grace Kiely

Grace Kiely

I am a theatre-maker and musician. Providing music for Moonfish’s first show, Bonny & Read (Edinburgh ‘07) I subsequently played the eponymous hero in Pinocchio–A Nightmare and was a mainstay of the company right up to their recent productions of Joseph O’Connor’s Redemption Falls and Star of the Sea. Wonderful work with Branar includes; Sruth na Teanga, Rockin Rhymes, Twas the Night Before Christmas, Maloney’s Dream, How to Catch a Star and Clann Lir. In 2013 I was nominated Best Supporting Actress in the Irish Times Theatre Awards for my portrayal of Millie in Mephisto’s The Mai. In 2015, I co-wrote and performed the site-specific, musical show In Good Hands with Catherine Ireton (AC England) touring the UK, Ireland, Macau and Shanghai. I moved to Cork in 2021 and have been performing, writing and composing with the brilliant Graffiti Theatre company as well as continuing to create my own work.

Hugh Farrell

Hugh Farrell

Hugh is an Irish writer, dramaturg and producer working across theatre, opera, music and the visual arts. He is the digital producer for Landmark Productions and a visiting researcher at the School of Creative Arts, Trinity College Dublin, where he is writing a paper on the emergence of experiential storytelling.

With Listen & Breathe, the artist collective he formed with sound designer Tyler Kieffer in 2015, Hugh creates blended-reality experiences exploring how we interact with ourselves, each other and our environment. Listen & Breathe’s experiences have been presented at music and arts festivals in Ireland and the United States. Their latest production, OF A MIND, guides audiences of up to 50 at a time on journeys through often-missed parts of their community in an exploration of mindfulness, urban ecology, and social interactions.

Hugh is currently creating an opera, I AM ALAN TURING , using the latest artificial intelligence from Open AI—a project supported by the Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory, the Yale Centre for Collaborative Media and Arts and the Yale Centre for British Art. Find outmore at www.iamalanturing.com.

Jenni Nikinmaa 2

Jenni Nikinmaa

Jenni Nikinmaa is a playwright, poet, performer & theatre-maker originally from Finland, currently based in Inishmore, Aran Islands. She creates site-related, immersive, and digital performances that often deal with difficult topics such as trauma, self-harm, and climate emergency through kind and unblinking forthrightness. She is also accidentally funny. Her plays, It´s True I Love You All So Much and Älä jätä jälkiä (Leave No Trace) premiered digitally during the lockdowns, and she also worked with Exit Productions to create a play within Google Docs during that time.

Most recently, she has been working on an immersive waiting room The Other World where we are on our way to Utopia – a work-in-progress showing of this was presented as part of Theatre57´s TEST residency in 2022. Jenni was shortlisted for Alpine Fellowship Theatre Prize in 2020 and graduated from The University of Galway in 2020 with a MA in Playwriting & Dramaturgy.

Maia Nunes

Maïa Nunes

Maïa Nunes (They/Them) is an Irish-Trinidadian performance artist whose inter-disciplinary practice explores legacies of colonialism, the transformative and world-conjuring potential of performance, & song as a liberation and healing practice.

Maïa has a background in visual arts with a BFA in textiles at NCAD.  This training still informs their practice which layers and weaves together various media (original song, written text, foley sound, spatial sound design, ritualistic gesture, sculpture, costume and masking) and evolving themes into multi-textural and immersive performance environments.

In 2021 Maïa’s video performance work Arima was purchased by the Irish Museum of Modern Art for their permanent collection, they had the first international showing of their work Crossings in Silver Tongued Seas exhibition, at Jupiter Woods Gallery, London. Maïa is also a 2021-22 Next Generation Artist, and a 2022 Platform 31 artist.

Sarah Devereux Scaled

Sarah Devereux

Sarah Devereux is a multidisciplinary artist, performer and extremely serious messer. Her work is surreal (but honest), crude (but intelligent), disturbing (but endearing) fabulous (but anxious) & immediate (but considered). She has exhibited & performed nationally and internationally.

She is a graduate of The National College of Art and Design. Sarah is Artist in Residence at VISUAL Center for Contemporary Art, Carlow 2020-22. She is co-artistic director of the acclaimed queer performance night SPICEBAG :an ad-hoc, grass roots, queer variety show. Her first solo show was presented at Dublin Fringe 2019 “My Fringe Show” was nominated for “Spirit of Wit Moira Brady Averill award”.

She has performed her comedic characters at a multitude of festivals, St. Patricks Festival Dublin, Cuirt Literature Festival, Mayo Pride, Body & Soul, All Together Now, Culture Night, GAZE, Vodafone Comedy, Lingo, K-Fest, Electric Picnic. Also at multiple cabaret, variety shows, comedy nights & events in Ireland.

She also makes socially engaged art based workshops for the burnt out & chronically ill.

Her hilarious & colourful design work under the alter-ego The Dirt Bird can be seen in almost every home throughout the country.

Sarah strives to always create work that is FUN-erable.

Seon Simpson

Seón Simpson

Seón Simpson in an award winning writer and director for theatre and one half of creative partnership SkelpieLimmer. Seón has worked in assisting roles on projects such as David Ireland’s Sadie (Lyric theatre/ BBC arts) and SPUD! (Lyric Theatre) Dir. Conleth Hill, Removed (Brian Friel Theatre) Dir. Emma Jordan, and Ubu The King (The MAC) Dir. Patrick J O’Reilly. Her Directing Credits include: The Dumb Waiter (Lyric Theatre), Now For the North (Lyric Theatre), Crave (Brian Friel Theatre), Let us go then, you and I (Accidental Theatre/ Brian Friel Theatre), Two Fingers Up (The New Theatre: The Dublin Fringe Festival/ The MAC/ Brian Friel Theatre), and Operation Ottolenghi/ Melons for two (Accidental Theatre: No Touching Theatre Festival). She was the recipient of the Brian Friel Medal (2017) and the James Ellis Bursary for Directing (2018), and was a MAC Hatch artist (2020) within creative partnership SkelpieLimmer. She was selected as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival, Irish Theatre Institute and Fishamble Duets programme (2021) under which she Co-wrote and directed Heave, a theatre/film hybrid. Her play, Two Fingers Up, won the Lustrum award (Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2022), the Abbey Theatre and Dublin Fringe Festival’s Creative Thinking Award (2019), and was shortlisted for Fishamble New Writing Award (2019).

Tom Moran 2

Tom Moran

Tom Moran is a writer-performer whose latest solo show, Tom Moran is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar premiered at the Dublin Fringe Festival where it was awarded the Fishamble New Writing Award and was described by The Arts Review in a 5 Star Review as, “The most searingly honest and moving show of the year”. Tom recently starred in The Christmas Break, a romantic comedy starring Justin Long (Dodgeball) and India Mullen (Normal People). Tom’s other recent credits include; West Side Story (Bord Gais Energy Theatre) and Copper Face Jacks: The Musical (The Olympia Theatre), Romeo in Romeo and Juliet (The Mill Theatre), Jack Absolute in The Rivals (Smock Alley) and Fierce Notions (Dublin Fringe), Edgar in King Lear (The Mill Theatre). Tom is also working on his debut book, a collection of comedic yet personal essays, as well as the host of Personality Bingo, his very own podcast. Twitter/Instagram: @tmoran93

MAKE Mentors

Gudega Laivina

Gundega Laivina

Gundega Laiviņa is a freelance performing arts and interdisciplinary curator and lecturer from Latvia, former artistic and managing director of the New Theatre Institute of Latvia and Homo Novus, International Festival of Contemporary Theatre. Gundega has been a curator of the Latvian exposition at the three latest editions of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space and a member of the curatorial team of the Latvian pavilion at Biennale di Venezia 16th International Architecture Exhibition. From 2010 till 2014, she was a member of the artistic board of Riga – European Cultural Capital 2014, responsible for artistic practices that engage with urban spaces and communities. Gundega has studied music, theory of culture and social anthropology, and has received several European level diplomas and certificates in arts management. Currently based in Brooklyn where she has recently graduated from the Pratt Institute’s Graduate Centre for Planning and the Environment.

Mojca Jug

Mojca Jug

Mojca Jug was born in Ptuj, Slovenia. She finished her primary and secondary education in Ptuj and from 1995 to till 2000 studied Special education at Faculty of education in Ljubljana. In June 1998 she started to work in Bunker as coordinator and administrator of the first edition of international festival of contemporary performing arts Mladi Levi.

She has worked for Bunker ever since and her major preoccupations within Bunker are:

– curating and producing the festival Mladi levi

– Coordinating and artistic programming of Bunker’s venue, Stara elektrarna (an old power station)

– mentoring younger staff and volunteers

– in the past years she was also the producer of Betontanc, Sanja Nešković Peršin, Jette Ostan Vejrup, Lyrical moments in the city,…

She was also the executive director of production house Fičo balet (2003 – 2005) and is producing a cycle of contemporary piano concert by Milko Lazar, as well coordinating a jazz program in café Repete, Ljubljana.

Her programming work extends beyond Bunker and is invited as a curator, programmer and mentor to numerous festivals and platforms.

She lives and works in Ljubljana.

Tom Creed

Tom Creed

Tom is one of Ireland’s leading opera and theatre directors, with a particular focus on new plays and operas by emerging and established writers and composers. His productions have been seen at all the major Irish theatres and festivals, and internationally in over 30 cities on three continents, including the Opéra National de Paris, the Edinburgh, Melbourne and Perth International Festivals, the Barbican Centre in London, and BAM, the Public Theater, the Irish Arts Center and PS122 in New York.

Recent work includes Donizetti’s opera Maria Stuarda with Irish National Opera, the world premiere of Mark O’Halloran’s play Conversations After Sex with Thisispopbaby at the Dublin Theatre Festival, for which he was nominated for Best Director at the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards for 2021, and the world premiere of Michael Gallen’s opera Elsewhere at the Abbey Theatre. He has directed eight productions with graduating acting and technical students at the Lir, most recently Lady Windermere’s Fan.

Tom was previously Festival Director of Cork Midsummer Festival, Theatre and Dance Curator of Kilkenny Arts Festival and Associate Director of Rough Magic Theatre Company. He is a member of the Expert Advisory Committee of Culture Ireland and a board member of Theatre Forum and GAZE Film Festival, and was a member of the steering committee of the National Campaign for the Arts from 2016 to 2022. He recently completed an MFA in Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD.

tomcreed.org