Mark Croasdale

Mark is an interdisciplinary artist and theatre maker inciting gentle, radical change through cosy, quality encounters. Mark’s work spans performance, installation, public happenings, and participatory experiences. Their practice aims to encourage direct contact and real encounters with people, ensuring artist and audiences co-exist in a realm of enquiry. Sometimes they find each other in a theatre, or passing in the street. Other times a chat over the phone, the page or a meeting through a screen. Mark curates experiences that embrace vulnerability and nurture connection by finding joy in the unexpected and often neglected conversations. Through storytelling, world building and wellbeing practices Mark works to create sheltered environments that reframe the ‘normal’ world around us to uncover complexity and wonder in the mundane. Queerness is embedded into Mark’s way of working, they question and blur traditional divisions of roles within the arts. In their world, calling someone for a casual phone conversation might quickly turn into an exploratory journey around their home (Devices, Contact 2020). Writing a letter could be transformed into a theatrical spectacle (Letters @ Lyme, National Trust 2017). A incidental encounter with ice-cream is a call to protest for equality (I Scream, 2021, part of Cap & Dove). A stage becomes a communal tea room complete with tastings and biscuit pairings. Mark’s work is fluid, transformative, with a sense of magic to it, always embracing the humour in being human. It’s work that gives people permission to be challenged and to speak. It’s comfortable confrontation.