The way I practice my role of a mentor is to use listening as a main tool where I  listen to the artist’s desires and needs, and create a safe space where they often clarify their own thoughts and find solutions as they speak to me.

Overall, I believe that the creative process is usually a process of undoing rather than doing, as very often the outcome is revealed rather than developed. Therefore, a lot of the time the mentoring process is about bringing to consciousness what is essential to the work and letting go of what is unnecessary. Very often during the mentoring, I witness artists breaking old patterns by becoming conscious of blockages and self-sabotaging, and having major realisations on elements of their work as they rediscover new limits and embrace hidden strengths.

Depending on what is needed, I often provide and propose practices, exercises, tools and ways, for extra support.

I mentor artists from the performing and live arts, both emerging and established, depending on our mutual desire to work together.

ONE OFF SESSION

This is a 90-minute one-off power session, where you might just one to discuss a specific issue or blockage in your creative process.

During the session, I can support you gain some clarity and guidance with any issues or challenges you might be dealing with in your creative process by responding with pieces of advice, exercises, tips, and practices depending on what we both feel will be beneficial for you at the present moment.

How to book: Book your session by emailing me at info@liaharaki.com

Lia Haraki’s contribution during the research and rehearsal process of our work “Fear Industry” was essential. Her stage experience and critical mind, combined with her dare and unconventional approach, opened new doors for a performance that included two stage actors and a soprano. Not only did her expertise instil the performance with a palpable sense of physicality, but her knowledge and ability to express and support narrative through physical expression beyond words remain unmatched. 

– Achim Wieland, Marios Ioannou (Artistic Directors, SRSLYyours Ensemble).

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Lia Haraki has been more than a mentor to us for many projects and she has influenced and inspired the way we think and act as performers on stage and as theatre artists during the process of work development. She has a unique way of communicating and her creative advice always intends to follow the artist's personal pathway with love and respect. She always came to embrace and improve our idea by fine tuning the existing procedure of the group. She was our mentor to two productions of our group, "The dust is expected to retreat by tomorrow" and "Top that" where her mentoring and guidance unlocked and revealed new possibilities.The best about working with Lia is her honesty and honest intentions.

- Elena Kallinikou and Marina Makri (Enacttheatre)

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First of all thank you for being our mentor in the process of adapting our piece in the context of Summer dance Festival. Your presence has been very informative and supporting. I think one of the things that helped a lot was the meetings that we had through zoom and your approach of layering the piece in to smaller subcategories of importance. For example making questions that helped to revalue the core idea and what the piece stands for and more practically afterwards seeing the personas as a separate part of the performance in order to highlight it's importance of performativity by asking questions of the imagery and story of each persona. What helped a lot too was respecting the line of the piece but giving advise in the rhythm of the piece, as to how big every section should be. Furthermore your understanding of the humorous aspect of the piece has helped to lighten the mood of the creators in us into enjoying our performative selves during the performance. Helping us with the transport of props has been a big relieve too!! 

- Styliana Apostolou (Dance and performance artist) 24/7/2024

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Though I have worked for a little under two decades with Lia as a performer and collaborator and am already quite familiar with many of her methods and approaches, I found the workshop of Performing Biography to be a structure and a physical space that was at once familiar and yet unknown territory for me to traverse. I had stepped into this particular workshop already knowing what I wanted to explore, I just didn't know how. The environment created by Lia was extremely supportive and graspable to work her methods into my own concept. Her clarity of stages and tools of creating life maps and extracting personal stories, that would perhaps at times be charged with emotion, were extremely helpful. Her layout lent an opportunity to zoom out of my own, very personal, life experiences and allowed me to just look at the work or potential work. The playfulness, immediate practice, consideration of our relationship to the audience and rhythm were all powerful tools that imbued confidence in my decisions towards presenting my work. She is very adept at extracting the essence of what you are searching for and yet allowing you the space to discover it yourself.

- Arianna Marcoulides (Freelance Dancer/Choreographer /Costume Designer) 26/8/2024

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Having someone to hold space for a piece and our dialoguing with it is of extreme importance for the unravelling of the piece and a process that demands great capacities for listening and empathisizing. Lia’s ability to hold and open up space for our revisiting of our piece has been a vessel of clarity. It seemed to me that Lia’s methods were asking questions and perhaps a silently sizzling omnipresent question guiding her approach might have been that of “how do we make the piece more of what it is?”. She approaches the artist’s vision and needs with great respect, curiosity and care. Questions are a widening field and Lia knows exactly how to pose questions that do widen, but also propel consise scrutiny and examination of what is really important for the piece to empower the means and messages the artists wish to employ. Lia’s approach is dialogic, meaning that she will encourage the artist to dive and seek deeper circumventing the turbulence of creation that can blur the navigation through honesty, clarity and deep connection between concept and physicality. Her courage and openness to simultaneously share her ways of perceiving and receiving the piece, while never imposing them on us as creators, has fostered luminous discussions and catered taking more conscious decisions as creators. Last but not least, Lia brings great positive energy into the process reminding us of the value of laughter, lightness when things get heavy and the insistence on the JOY of creating. I feel deeply grateful for Lia’s mentoring! Thank you, Lia!

- Polena Kolia Petersen (Dancer , maker and community dance practitioner) 27/8/2024

Being a performance maker myself for many years, I have been blessed with collaborating with inspiring mentors along the way who supported the development of my work like dramaturge Guy Cools and mentor Evi Haraki Mahera. The mentoring was extremely useful and challenging as it inspired me to dig deep into my creative universe and understand what is essential for me to share with the world during each creative process. I have been mentoring artists for over twenty years both through my own sessions and methods and as a lecturer at the University of Nicosia.

Specifically, my role as a mentor in your creative process could take any or all of the following forms:

-support you to clarify and articulate your ideas and concepts

-help you deal with different kinds of challenges and blockages during the process

-share with you relevant methods and practices depending on what is needed in each situation

-keeping track of the timeline, the developments and the findings of your process

-mirroring back to you your own realisations so you become conscious and clear about them

-offer readings, tools, exercises and ways of extra support and experimentation if needed.