A Thank-you Letter/A Love Letter – Addressed to Many
Dear Squeezy Team (for that is what we are called now courtesy of Care Centred brilliant Shelley – the work producer)The most amazing week has flown by, in fact, the most joyful and perfect project has zoomed past…. From the excitement we all shared through the build-up, to the magical making process and each emotional performance. Coming together the care we have for each other allowed our creativity to flow so beautifully. Over many reflection sessions, I question how we can figure out just how the Squeeze Box journey has been so joyful, full of laughter and happiness, and yet super productive – the epitome of process! One of many fond memories I have is walking into MakeTank on performance day and being astounded as to how this team has transformed an empty space into colour, depth, engagement, excitement, quality and so much more, in just a couple of days… then thanking my lucky stars I have another whole day in the company of you all.
We Workshopped
As part of the epic adventure which is Squeeze Box 23, I have been so fortunate to work with an amazing applied creative team to deliver conversation-based workshops in Manchester. After seeing on social media that Dr Tony Gee's (with co-author Warren Linds) Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry has been released, their book on the magic of workshops, it feels apt to share with you my reflections and learning from time spent in an extraordinary creative space with brilliant creators. These workshops were designed to be a devising/research mechanism to share practise and to learn from the disabled community – to add weight to the voice amplification in Squeeze Box and to learn from the lived experience of disabled people living in a city, feeding their experiences back to the wider communication. The weekend however totally transcended this; a reminding (if one ever needed to be reminded) that the art of workshop is a unique and powerful process in itself, not an add-on, nor a parallel process. It is rather a performance/journey/creative expression that probably can’t be matched by any individual artform or platform. Thank you so much to Longsight art space, Chi and Chris, the artistic team, and of course the participants.
And Just Like That, We are Back
That was so joyful! We zoomed together, marking the first creative activity of Squeeze Box 23 and it was worth everything. The agonising character cutting, the squeezing Squeeze Box into ACE guidelines and sometime frustrating questions, the ‘thanks for a strong application but we are not able to fund your project at this time’ from Jerwood, the to-ing and fro-ing from partners and the general head scratching over budgets. Not like some of that wasn’t exciting, meaningful and engaging (and the process and feed-back from Jerwood was immensely useful from an eventual ACE yes!), it is just difficult to compare the application process with the nourishing and energy-boost of that one Zoom!