MCH | BLANK

Official website for Mark C. Hewitt & Blank Productions

Biography

Mark C. Hewitt is a UK-based writer, theatre and performance maker, collaborative artist.

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 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. 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, is a highly experimental ensemble work due to be premiered at Brighton Fringe Festival in May 2024.

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 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 with the over-arching title,
Les Coffrets, (meaning the boxes, related to the shape of the texts on the page) was developed in 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 variously been screened at over 40 short film festivals in more than 20 countries and led to being featured as a finalist at the Arte Laguna Prize exhibition in Venice in March 2023 and the We Art Open Worldwide 2024 exhibition at CREA Cantiere del Contemporaneo in Venice in February 2024.

He has 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.

He has worked on various 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, 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.

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