Mark C.
Hewitt

I am a writer (playwright/poet), theatre & performance maker & stage director. Artistic collaboration is central to my practice. Theatre plays include Prison Dialogues (2021), consisting of interweaving male and female dialogues, loosely informed by my work as an artist in UK prisons; Labyrinth (2019), an English version of a Portuguese theatre monologue developed in collaboration with actress Marta Carvalho; and The Revenge Fantasy Club (2012), a café play nominated for Best New Play Award at Brighton Fringe 2013. In 2013, a grant from the Artists International Development Fund allowed me to collaborate with Norwegian percussionist/composer Thomas Strønen, leading to a full-length play, Civilization and its Discontents: 11 Movements for Theatre, yet to be performed. One section of this play, Songs of the Chambermaids, was the focus of a theatre residency hosted by Academia de Teatro TinBra, in Braga, Portugal, in 2021, and a videographic version of this sequence was released in 2023, winning Best Experimental Film at its premiere screening at Brighton Rocks International Film Festival. My poem sequence, Les Coffrets, was developed as a collection of micro-videos in collaboration with digital artist Matt Parsons, and they have now variously been screened at over 40 short film festivals in more than 20 countries with one of them, Premium, a Finalist at the Arte Laguna Prize exhibition in Venice in March 2023.  As a stage director, I have R&D'd over 20 original live literature and theatre productions, including 'Dementia Diaries' by poet Maria Jastrzebska (which toured nationally during 2011 supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award); 'Roll Over Atlantic' by Caribbean-British poet John Agard; 'Dora vs Picasso' a flamenco theatre piece by poet Grace Nichols; and 'Zones of Avoidance' by Maggie Sawkins, which was winner in 2013 of the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Outside of performance-related activity, I’ve long been interested in the use of text in the public realm and have collaborated with visual artists on a number of installation projects, including 'Polska by the Sea' (a celebration of Eastbourne's migrant Polish community with photographer Lisa Barnard, Eastbourne Railway Station 2009); 'Congregation', a narrative in poem form for an autobiographical video installation by photographer Malcolm Glover filmed in Ireland and England (2016); and a text ('Harty Triptych') carved into two (now dilapidated) resting points by sculptor Alun Heslop on a cycle trail through a nature reserve on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. I work frequently on socially engaged arts projects with vulnerable or marginalised individuals, including 'Diving into the Wreck', a multimedia production developed in Portsmouth with addicts in recovery; and Penned Up, a strand of literature festivals in prisons that involve prisoners in the working process, recognised nationally in the UK in The Big Issue's list of 'Top 100 Changemakers of 2020'.