Tickets on Sale!!!!!!
That feels so exciting to say – get your tickets for BOXED! 2026 ….now!
This feels like a really hopeful thing to be able to share with you – especially after the honest reflections from my last blog. Things are still rocky my end, yet, as I said, tickets are on sale! I really hope you can join us… I am immensely proud of this process and it will culminate with you navigating the Barnfield in an absurd, multisensory, interactive, promenade performance with escape-room-vibes. The whole team can’t wait to share this story with you, which we have carefully crafted and nurtured for the last eight plus months. Get ready to enter tick-box-land – where time is not necessary your own and the bombardment of tangling red tape and endless forms can only be met with the resilience of disability, humanity and hope…
Read more about the work’s access measures we are putting in place, and crucially how to secure your spot. We are live for three performances over the 21st and 22nd of May. BOXED! 2026 is truly a unique event; the work oozes from the walls of the mighty Barnfield Theatre. BOXED! is a battle of waiting, being assessed, trying to satisfy an endless demand for evidence… verses the human need to care and feel empathy. This outcry is very much informed by the layout and aesthetics of Barnfield. You literally do not want to miss it!
However, this blog is not just one big marketing ploy (well… it sort of is! Buy tickets now…!).
So, on creative reflection, the BOXED! process shares a lot of imagery, themes, characters and story from previous Squeeze Boxes. As well as a similar artist team (Tim and Emma, Nat offering creative and particle in sight from a far…and new brilliant people just joining us, the likes of performer and theatre maker Fynn, and producer Sophia, who has been a force of natural in realising the work), the medium of sounds and live projecting with performance is similar to our last process too.
But, even more so this time, we our transcending the relationship of the audience and performer to even more exciting levels. In 2023, Squeeze Box at MakeTank was ambitious in the way we challenged traditional and often inaccessible notions of what theatre is or can be. We had a unique soft opening where the audience and artist could just chat and be. This performance in May… well we might just well be flipping this on its head!
image from Cockington 2021 - one of the first ideas we experimented with - Yes it only got weirder and more radical from this point!
Let’s not give away spoilers of course, but what I can tell you is going to be a radical, wild ride of emotions and a totally new way of telling this story. Potentially risky!!Most definitely, but risk, play and making up as I go along is at the heart my process!
But also, we have now tested our new way of presenting this story. In March, we had a really joyful session of a day in Paignton at the Methodist church. Tim brought some gear to the space, cameras, screens, of course a projector and lots of cable as standard. We mocked the mock assessment! And five unexpecting students came to experience our mother of all DIY sharing!
They were brilliant sports and it was perfect being in this lovely space between devising and scratching (showing an idea back). As well as a deep sense of affirmation and confidence that our working ideas might just have something in them, two things really came from this slightly bizarre, off the cuff, surreal, rushed but also weirdly in control, bonanza of concepts:
Theatre and story telling is so powerful! We were in a church hall with your standard well walked on carpet, crosses on the wall and bibles galore etc. and then we were also in a medical/social care waiting room, nervously waiting for our appointment. It was extortionary how arranging chairs, dressing a table with a couple of leaflets and Tim and the incredible Fynn in characters as flustered case workers… and we were totally transported to a waiting room, with chairs arranged just so, leaflet etc. It was demonstration of the power of imagination and taking people on a journey. But also, the emotion and physical embodiment of anxiety that is evoked by a waiting room was there to. And that’s not to mention the assessment scenes, which again were ‘just’ a cluster of screens and wires and equipment, and Tim and Fynn winging it, in their developing character of case worker Fynn and Tim. This transformation was more than students playing along (you could argue that almost all audiences do a degree of playing along/suspended disbelief), they were very much in this world we created. Real food for thought around how little changes to space can story tell ten folds, and if the live performers lean into that, we can transform audience anywhere!
Integrated care and access in theatre is crucial… The students were amazing and their diverse experience shined though their feedback. They talked about how we should defiantly push the unconfutable and unease – the light relief moments give us permission to do that even more… but we must think even more carefully about how we take care of our audience. In a front-on theatre piece, access may well be more straight forward… perhaps?? Keeping doors open with a clearway to a calm relaxing space, different kind of seating for different kind of bodies, ear defenders and fidget toys, touch tours and audio description, giving people permission to move or make noise etc
However, in this labyrinth-like journey of BOXED!, we need to think even more creatively. The logistics of finding your way back to the chill-out-space is the first thing to consider… Ok, the Barnfield isn’t quite a legendary mythical maze that the further you go in, the more impossible it is to find your way out… but a new building is confusing to navigate for anyone, especially when there is a full-blooded performance happening around you. Secondly, potentially if you know as an audience number you might benefit from a more straight forward exit, the venue could support you in advance with stuff like making sure you have a seat near the doors or an aisle seat etc… Within BOXED! sitting in a neat row is defiantly not our vibe. There will be a weird feeling of some audience members needing to get some fresh air but leaving your small group is deffo more awkward then discreetly moving from your aisle seat??
Ponding on the, after a fruitful reflection of the whole rehearsal day, we gather our thoughts together and came up with a potential of returning to care in practise. What would a care centred process look like in this scenario? Our conclusion, and we are really excited about this radical and creativity of this idea, is to have an access worker being there throughout the show. Essentially, they are the person that should be in a process of assessments which disabled folk having to constantly repeat to get any help from social services, let alone benefits processes and dealing with DWP.
This access worker who won’t necessarily be seen by the other characters, will have powers to pause the performance and check in with audience. Our hope is that if someone does need to check out, it will be a lot more smother to do this after the access worker has paused the show, and invited people to stay put if they need a longer break.
Alongside having a creative access statement at the start of the show, giving people permission to leave when they need to in a more human way, and clearer signs, we hope that more people will feel confidence to experience a show of this style. Whether it is that moment of being told you don’t qualify, to having to justify your day reality, to dark humour as an act of resilience or a space to come together as human beings along the one of BOXED! and Squeeze Box share a common thread line. However, if you have experienced Squeeze Box, you will deffo not be surprised that we have come up with something even more whacky, colourful, political, radical and magical than ever before!