Mark C. Hewitt is a writer, theatre & performance maker and collaborative artist based in the south of England.
Stage plays include Prison Dialogues (2021), consisting of alternating/interweaving male and female dialogues loosely informed by his work as an artist in UK prisons; Labyrinth (2019), an English version of a Portuguese theatre monologue, translated and 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. He has collaborated on two live literature productions with composer Peter Copley: Scrublands (2012), a multimedia performance with live music for string sextet, and Expiry tbc (2013), for live and recorded cello and live and recorded voices. In 2013, a grant from the Artists International Development Fund allowed him to collaborate with Norwegian sampling percussionist, Thomas Strønen, leading to a full-length theatre work, Civilization and its Discontents, yet to be performed. A stand-alone section of the play, Songs of the Chambermaids, was separately developed and performed in 2021 at a theatre residency in Braga, Portugal, hosted by Academia de Teatro TinBra. A video version of this sequence was first screened at Brighton Rocks International Film Festival in June 2023, where it won Best Experimental Film. His latest play, Geneva Convention (2024), is a highly experimental ensemble work that was premiered to critical acclaim at Brighton Fringe Festival in May 2024:
"… a timely and urgent reminder of the power of theatre to discomfit. Four women acts combine in Greek chorus, join hands, peel off, turn on each other … What's wrought is spare, original, strange, at its deepest inconsolable." (Simon Jenner, Fringe Review)
As a stage director, he has R&D'd and premiered over 20 original live literature and theatre productions, including Dementia Diaries (2009/2011) by Maria Jastrzębska, which toured to UK schools of medicine supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award; Roll Over Atlantic, a one man show by Caribbean-British poet John Agard (2015); Dora vs Picasso, a flamenco theatre piece with text by Guyanese poet Grace Nichols (2015); and Zones of Avoidance by Maggie Sawkins, which was 2013 winner of The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.
An enigmatic poem sequence, Les Coffrets, was developed during the covid lockdowns of 2020 as a collection of micro-videos in collaboration with digital artist Matt Parsons. Individually, these miniature works - all less than 90 seconds duration - 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 exhibition in Venice in March 2023.
He has collaborated with visual artists on a number of installation projects, images of which can be seen on the Installation Projects gallery page on this website. He also frequently works on socially engaged projects with vulnerable or marginalised individuals, which, to date, has included Diving into the Wreck, a multimedia production developed in Portsmouth with addicts in recovery; and Penned Up, a strand of literature festivals in prisons, recognised nationally in The Big Issue's list of 'Top 100 Changemakers of 2020'.
He is founder and Artistic Director of LLL Productions (a live literature production company) and Blank Productions (focused on international work and interdisciplinary collaborations). In 2010, he co-founded intercultural performing arts company, Crosspath, with Caribbean-British poets John Agard and Grace Nichols. In 2018 he co-founded Penned Up with writer/cultural activist David Kendall. In July 2023, he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
MCH 2019