Just Round the Corner
This September, I rolled* out of bed and walked less than 2 minutes to work. Through the working morning of Paignton dawn, I walked round 3 corners and into a magical creative space. This definitely needs celebrating! In the centre of a grockle holiday-maker heaven, there is a plane of glass dividing the business-as-usual from radical arts, creative community and workshop. It is part of what Filament/WideOpen do, to find a link to ensure these two worlds communicate, but there is also another world in this mix. Maybe the most important to the organisations mentioned, the people, the locals, the community of Torbay. We live, sleep, play and work in our UNESCO Geo-park** – the rock around us speaks to us, it is our culture – I am part of this community, we are here all year round, not just cheap summer deals for a break away from where ever city folk want to escape from.
Ok, the space isn’t perfect, the doors have a horrible squeak that brings you out of even the deepest meditation into our creative worlds. The level access door can only be opened with a key, or something like that anyway, leaving me on more than one occasion, banging on the window for entry – although most of the time, the banging is followed be a whisper, “sorry, I’m late” to an amazing sessions… My dad used to theorise a phenomenon that goes a bit like: the closer you live near somewhere, the more likely you are going to be late. Jen reinforced this notion when she lived-in here and always ended up being made late to get downstairs by our cat Jesse who loved all the attention – now slightly further away she seems to have broken the sound barrier, when calls for care are sent!
Again, the fact that this cultural hub is on my doorstep is incredible. The Projection Room has been buzzing with activity, artwork and conversations. From community influenced writing, full scale seaweed prints, beautiful folk music about Brixham and the sea, to the harsh reality of making political work in a climate crisis, the space has drawn me back, again and again.
This space is even more epic due to its proximity and connection to the lovely, rich and homely space that is the Liberal Club; Yes, Paignton is coming alive. There are also pop-up venues and partners dotted around Paignton, all collaborating and staying creative whilst we wait, with everything crossed, for the mighty Paignton Picture House to open its doors once again.
In the meantime, the Liberal Club has transcended from a gathering space for free-thinkers of Torbay, to glare at the conservative Club just down the way, to a cinema, a hairdresser, some kind of funky second hand stockpile, and now to a making space. Celebrating its latest identity, Squeeze Box will be occupying the goldfish bowl like triangle space, and as WideOpen puts it, ‘the Liberal Club will be our base for the week beginning 7th October’. Not quite big enough for a full throttle workshop, but perfect to play in and polish certain aspects of Squeeze Box as we dream of the next stages of our collaborations together and prepare for the week after, when we are testing out a Takeover model in the amazing Barnfield Theatre, Exeter Northcott.
Photo by: Appleyton Event Photography
I had a brilliant chat with Nat (I think it’s impossible not to describe a chat with Nat as being ‘brilliant’) who reflected on the twilight period of my first post Uni collaboration, You, Me and My Voice. Naturally the need to care for each other by locking down in 2020 didn’t help, but it felt a real uphill battle and fun-zapping trying to take work to the ‘next stage’ – whatever that means. After the most joyful time with the company, devising, rehearsing and performing original work and reaching people on a human level, we sat down with a crossroads in-front of us. The reality of attitudinal barriers we had faced and the toll it had taken on us meant, the thought of doing it again (but this time, not with the safety blanket of home, a home crowd and immediate network of support), felt too much like impossible. The learning and relationships developed through YMMV was the springboard to my creative journey, most notably, the creative bond between Steve and myself. However, the work, and our resilience with the very idea of touring, needed to be given time to breath, recover and to reform and take shape. To even consider touring again we would have to create new ways of working. This is when we reached out to Tim, Clair, Shelley, Michael and so many more totally transformative people. Working on process as performance and focussing on care centred practise – from this, together we’ve developed Squeeze Box!
Maybe this journey is destined for a similar conclusion – maybe Squeeze Box has ‘served its purpose’. That time and freedom to celebrate and care for each other in the MakeTank was a moment in time that created so much more than a theatre piece. A way of working, a way of being human, celebrating disabilities and everyone who entered the space. This is why we really went back to ACE for more development time. I’m not sure yet if the work is ready to bring to people, I definitely know systems of touring are not ready for us! The care needs and creative ambitions of the collective of Squeeze Box cannot be held by showing up to a venue, having travelled half a day and then get in, probably have to do a performance that night, trying to fit in at least 3 workshop offers and 4 more performances, out the door a day later, and on to the next venue. Oh yeah and don’t forget the sick to the pit of your stomach guilt you will feel if ticket uptake wasn’t as high as the partners involved needed it to be, or indeed ACE expected it to be. For some folks, this might well be the life, but after speaking to a lot of artists, it really isn’t. Burnout is the default state for too many individual artists and artist led companies at the moment and unless we stand together to change and find new ways of touring the arts will be poorer for losing those brilliant artists who may just not have the strength and stamina of others – if those who continue to make in these difficult times are constantly pushed beyond themselves how can they maintain their creative vibe.
Let’s take our time in October, let’s gets this right. Squeeze Box speaks to all of us with a care centred approach. If you took out the Squeeze Box as a piece of work, from us as a collective, the creative potential is still awesome. This is the essence of what we are making- our ability to care for each other is who we are, everything else is just theatre. I absolutely want as many people to come on the Squeeze Box journey as possible, and that will probably mean going on a road trip – but touring, for touring sake……. nah!
*I say ‘Rolled out of bed’ for the way it roles off the tongue. Of course, for me (many disabled folk) getting up is a complicated ritual, with weeks of planning, equipment galore, an intense economy of care exchange between at least two bodies. Getting up is exhausting – we can all relate to that, but in my case, there are many levels of exhaustion.
** The Geo-park is an awe inspiring colossal force of nature, which results in layers of rock telling the story of earth, 1.4 billion years in the making. The colourful rock landscape around us is beautiful in itself, but if you look a little deeper, you could literally look through time – through hundreds and millions of years. I wrote an amateur guide to Torbay geology, which quite literally does not scratch the service. Our bay is an experience of wonder and exponential dread at the same time – one of the few things that might well match astronauts experiences when they look back to earth on the edge of orbits ….. or as this, I guess human, put it on Tripadvisor, Torbay is one-star, and is:
I mean they’ve got a point, as the very rock teaches us, is anything really worth the petrol! You just got to laugh, right?