MCH | BLANK

Official website for Mark C. Hewitt & Blank Productions

Body Language
2006

Body Language was a solo performance of life study writings - word sketches of the human figure - developed as a live literature production and performed at Norden Farm Centre for the Arts in Maidenhead, in 2006, directed by Matthew Scott of 1157performancegroup.

These texts, made mainly at artists' life study groups between 1997 and 2015 (before and after this production), are poetic in the way that they mine language for the possibilities of description but are also very much made 'in the moment', responding directly to the figure, using observation precisely in the same way that a visual artist would. In another sense, because of the nature of language and metaphor, many of the most successful pieces describe what is
not there (but suggested by what is).

I continue (off and on) to make life study sketches, or 'nudes in words', as an element of my practice. Two or three of these life study texts are used in the dialogue between the two central characters of my play, 'Civilization and its Discontents: 11 Movements for Theatre', where they become the inciting amoral provocation that leads to the play's tragic d
énoument.

Below: old school photographic image for Body Language by Josh Pulman, (printed in the darkroom no less).

BodyLanguage-MCHprofile