Selected Quotations, Mentors and Protégés 2002-2007

Dance

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

Mentor 2006/2007 to dancer and choreographer Anani Dodji Sanouvi from Togo

“[The Arts Initiative] allows a process in depth over a longer period of time, which is not product-oriented. And it’s generous. That’s an exceptional thing because it creates a chance that a relationship can happen between two artists. Well, you don’t have so many opportunities to do that.”

Anani Dodji Sanouvi

“Inner silence. I think that’s what we have in common. I understood her when I saw her moving on stage. This kind of silence is a very strong, very soft energy that you have inside you and that you dance and play to the music. I saw it in her. I’m in the right place at the right time, and that’s priceless.”

Literature

Tahar Ben Jelloun

Mentor 2006/2007 to novelist Edem Awumey from Togo

“Well, we have had several methods of working up until now. The first, necessarily, when we don’t see each other, is that we communicate by email. He sends me a chapter. I read it. I tell him what I think about it; but I prefer the other method that we have been using since we have been in Tangier; in other words we chat, we talk, but not necessarily about his own book.What interests me is not to be a corrector or to be a teacher, but to be someone who accompanies a writer as he writes.”

Edem Awumey

“It was fantastic luck that enabled me to meet a writer. Obviously, I knew a bit about [Tahar Ben Jelloun’s] work, but meeting a writer, in the flesh, I was going to say in his ‘true reality’.... Very, very lucky.”

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mentor 2004/2005 to novelist Antonio García Ángel from Colombia

“What I try is not to convince Antonio that there is only one way to produce novels, not at all. I think there are probably as many ways as there are novelists, and what is important is that he finds his own way, the way in which he can take advantage of his own potential. This I think will be the best help I can give him.”

Antonio García Ángel

“I feel that in a literary sense he’s a liberator. I remember he once told me: ‘In literature there’s nothing you can’t write about. All subjects are worthwhile, all one wants to write about one can write about as long as one always writes it well.’ And this is like…that kind of declaration of principles gives me lots of confidence as it doesn’t limit your creation.”

Toni Morrison

Mentor 2002/2003 to novelist Julia Leigh from Australia

“We’re interested in the process by which art gets done … not the consequence at this point but the act, the process, how you get to think about these things, and with whom, and how you get to trust certain parts of your own imagination.”

Julia Leigh

“It’s the invaluable experience of having Toni being there just as a general support, just to read the work. I know that she’s been extraordinarily generous in that she doesn’t need to do it, you know, so that’s been a really invaluable thing, and then there’s also been this, what this scholarship has afforded me, which is time…”

Film

Stephen Frears

Mentor 2006/2007 to film-maker Josué Méndez from Peru

“I often teach at the National Film School of England…. You deal with people who really don’t know anything. And it makes you articulate. Most important of all, young people teach you a lot and keep you alive in the best possible sense. I never know if I do as much for them as they do for me.”

Josué Méndez

“It’s a dream. How on earth would I have thought of working with Frears, one on one? It doesn’t happen, you know, and if it weren’t for Rolex it would not happen: it’s just impossible for a Peruvian to work with Frears. So it makes the impossible possible.”

Mira Nair

Mentor 2004/2005 to film-maker Aditya Assarat from Thailand

“…to let somebody into the mentor-protégé relationship, there must be a dialogue between us. I can’t just be giving. And so in Aditya’s work I saw something I could learn from.… He has the talent to know how to frame something. He really knows what a story is, what is the right story to tell.”

Aditya Assarat

“I realised that what [Mira Nair] does is not much different from what I do. Film-making is the same everywhere. It’s a race against time and every director is under pressure and makes mistakes. It gave me the confidence that I can do what she does.”

Music

Jessye Norman

Mentor 2004/2005 to singer Susan Platts from Canada

“What I’m working with Susan in achieving is convincing her that it is all right for that incredible voice that is inside of her to live free, to absolutely come out of her in all the freedom that she feels quite naturally for the text. One of the reasons that we’ve worked together so wonderfully over these last months is that she and I are very interested in what actually we have to say.”

Susan Platts

“So it’s incredibly wonderful to know that if I sent her an email right now, she’d probably email me back within a couple of hours. And if it was something, especially if it was something desperate like: ‘Help, I really need your help!’ she’ll always phone me and we’ll talk it through; and every so often there’s that sort of sense of: I’m talking to Jessye Norman!”

Sir Colin Davis

Mentor 2002/2003 to conductor Josep Caballé-Domenech from Spain

“Music is so odd because it takes place in time, and it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it’s a kind of image of one’s whole life. But you begin, and towards the end death puts its hand on your shoulder and says: ‘It’s time,’ and the piece comes to an end. And if you look at it that way, every time you are doing a piece, your life is on the line too.”

Josep Caballé-Domenech

“There are things you learn now [during the mentoring year] and there are things you just have somewhere in your head, and some time, after two, three, five, ten, 15 years you realise – oh, that’s what he [the mentor] did. You never know...”

Visual Arts

John Baldessari

Mentor 2006/2007 to artist Alejandro Cesarco from Uruguay

“I’ve always thought in teaching you’ve been successful when you’ve made contact and you can see the light lighting up in their eyes, you know. And you try everything until you can see that moment when, you know, they’re understanding what you said. And so a good way, if you both profess to be artists, is to work on something together, and then you kind of talk that way.”

“I think I found the idea of just having one student very attractive, because I think that the ideal situation, a writer once said about teaching – and I’ll always remember it: ‘The ideal teaching is the teacher on one end of the log and the student at the other end of the log, and that’s it’.”

Alejandro Cesarco

“…the first few meetings were just getting to know each other as people I guess and asking questions – what do you think of this, what do you think of that? And me showing him work, and him responding to it. And then it kind of flowed naturally that perhaps the most productive way of going about it was just to work together and collaborate on something.”

David Hockney

Mentor 2004/2005 to painter Matthias Weischer from Germany

“I met Matthias and we got on, I liked him, he laughed at my jokes – but I saw the interest, and he said he’d seen my work and knew my interests, and I have an interest in pictorial space, naturally, and perspective as well. So that was why. But, you know, I said when the year’s up, well, it doesn’t matter, I’ve just got a new friend in a young painter. It won’t end, at the year’s end.”

“Well practical things are simple to teach, you know, and in a way you can teach the craft but you can’t teach the poetry, can you? It seems to me they gave up the craft and tried to teach the poetry, which I don’t think you can do really.”

Matthias Weischer

“David always told me painting is an old man’s work…. I think you need 50, 40 years now to go really into it. And it’s really an interesting point, I think.”

Theatre

Julie Taymor

Mentor 2006/2007 to director Selina Cartmell from the United Kingdom)

“I think if you feel strongly about your vision – and that doesn’t mean that other people can’t influence you and can’t inspire you and can’t give you notes, or do whatever Selina’s going through right now – you just have to hold on to what you were after, and be able to take in the messages, the suggestions, the help, whether it be helpful or not. But keep that focus going towards what you love about it. Where’s the positive, where are you aiming for, what can you let go and still get there?”

Selina Cartmell

“Julie was over in Dublin to see ‘Festen’ at the Gate Theatre which I directed for the Dublin Theatre Festival. After the show we discussed how far you can push the form and how to keep taking risks. I felt Julie understood the way I worked, and she had some very interesting observations about the role of the ensemble in this production. One of the most important things Julie has given me is the strength to not be categorised and to feel free to move through a diverse range of artistic mediums in order to express my vision.”

Sir Peter Hall

Mentor 2004/2005 to playwright and director Lara Foot Newton from South Africa

“Lara wasn’t beginning, she’d done a lot already. What she needed was to be confirmed in some sense, and made absolutely confident. And I hope I played a little part in that. She certainly helped me in my confidence.… I’m very much against the idea of master classes and masters, anyway, in the sense that we’re grand and we’re handing something on. I think all we can do is say to them: ‘Do what you want, do your obsession, be courageous. Don’t do what I do. I’m me, you’re you’.”

Lara Foot Newton

“I always think you learn from the person rather than from the skill of the person. So whilst he has his massive skill and experience and technique which I’m learning every day that I’m with him, and seeing how he analyses a text and uses the text, I think ultimately I’ll learn from him as a man, from what kind of a man he is, and how that will affect me as a human being. And I think all great mentors and artists are like that, that they pass on something that is not quantifiable.”