Write here - Royal and Derngate Theatre
Write here – Royal and Derngate Theatre
As a result of a successful pilot which was part of the Young Cultural Creators scheme, Northamptonshire County Council Arts and Children’s Rights are partners hosting a residency at the Royal and Derngate theatre in Northamptonshire with poet Mark Gwynne Jones . Two youth theatre groups are being integrated in a residency that will help them work on their creative writing and performance skills. The young people involved are all hard to reach, including looked after children and children excluded from school.
Outcomes will include:
• Performance opportunities at Northampton based arts festivals including The Lyric Lounge
• Digital recordings of the young people’s work
• Mentoring for Northampton based poet Paschalla Sharpe.
About Mark Gwynne Jones
Four times fringe-award winner, Mark Gwynne Jones is well known for mind altering poetry with an almost music-hall edge. He mixes humour and poignancy with great skill and through collaborations with film-makers and musicians he is pushing poetry in new and exciting directions. Mark’s work is contagious, gritty and sometimes startlingly sensitive.
Appearing solo and with The Psychicbread, a show combining poetry and music Mark has toured with Kate Rusby and performed alongside The Levellers, Alan Bates, Mark Radcliffe and John Peel favourites Half Man Half Biscuit. He has sold poetry to the CIA; written poetry with disenfranchised kids in some of the most deprived areas of Britain and held writing residencies at The Harley Gallery; The Cornerhouse Cinema, Manchester; Sudbury Prison and with Service Children’s Education in the Netherlands, Germany and Cyprus. Mark regularly performs at Ronnie Scott’s, the Edinburgh Festival, The Arvon Foundation and at music and literature festivals throughout the UK and abroad. In 2008 Loughborough University commissioned Mark to write a series of poems for a performance walk and following the event’s success, Gunpowder Parks commissioned him to write in and around four of London’s central parks exploring what is meant by ‘common ground’ in 21st century Britain. Mark has won The National Trust Poetry Competition and the Buxton Festival Fringe. He has staged multi-media shows with artists in Glasgow, Copenhagen and Amsterdam and appeared on a compilation CD alongside new work by Rick Wakeman, Gordon Giltrap and Roy Harper (The Sky Goes all the Way Home, Voiceprint Records).
With film-maker Andy Lawrence, Mark has produced a unique series of 6 film-poems. It’s Only Water was broadcast by ITV and The Message, a screenplay mixing poetry and drama, ran for seven nights on SKY television.
BBC Radio 3’s Verity Sharp recently featured Mark’s album of poetry and music In the light of this (Route, 2007) and his debut collection the book/cd Psychicbread (Route, 2003) has played on radio stations from California to Sydney, Australia. Both publications are available from www.route-online.com
