Mark C.
Hewitt

I am predominantly a writer and performance maker. Artistic collaboration is central to my practice. Theatre works include a critically acclaimed experimental play, Geneva Convention (2024); Prison Dialogues (2021), 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 Festival 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 video 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 50 short film festivals in more than 20 countries with one of them, Premium, a Finalist at the Arte Laguna Prize in March 2023.  As a stage director, I've 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 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. I work frequently on socially engaged 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'.