Squeeze Box is the symbiotic relationships/possibilities of combining live sound/projection creation & performance – a ‘process as performance’ multi-discipline experience for meaningful audience engagement
An experimental, live sound and projection installation about the disabled experience
Squeeze Box is back this October working on a takeover with Exeter Northcott. to enrich/diversify the disabled voices within the work, we are offering two Seed Commissions for local disabled and/or neurodiverse artists worth £400 plus access support. Click here for information on how to apply
This 'jam' incorporates live performance, sound and projection, to explore the disabled experience. Witness artists battling against oppressive systems and celebrating the collective power of humanity.
This unique event brings together radical tech, lo-fi instruments and the voice of the artist, to create space for audiences to play, engage and reflect on what it might feel like to exist in the unrelenting Orwellian and Kafkaeseque ‘Squeezebox’ of disability, where identity, self-worth and spirit must be left behind.
After a rich, fruitful and experimental R&D, Squeeze Box landed with colour, joy, raw and most importantly, care by taking over MakeTank Exeter in every sense of the word! Over two days in October 2023, we welcomed audiences into a true and honest expression of disability.
The work highlights the all-encompassing emotional rollercoaster of a care package assessment – where faceless names & nameless panels decide the worth of an individual – who ‘deserves’ to be able to get up this morning, who shall we allow to eat today? Squeeze Box takes audiences through the almost out-of-body experience of seeing your life decided for you. Everyone can relate to an experience of their life being controlled or shifted away from where they long to go.
Squeeze Box is a crucible for ongoing experimentation, providing audiences & wider collaborators with a window into the work, its purpose & concerns. The core creators of sound, projection & performance will form the foundation of this deep, constantly evolving process, a creative exploration of the world of disability, shaping immersive spaces, incorporating multi-projection video/audio, amplifying impaired voices.
Squeeze Box is an innovative blend of ‘audience ready’ material, workshop style space & live devising session. Warmly held by pre/post show conversations, humour, gentle moments & humanity, artist & audiences transcends politics, solo–thinking & the status-quo, reaching inner emotions, empathy & impulsion. The work flows through a loose narrative of the care package assessment process. This is punctuated by hard hitting imagery, the reality of social care cuts, directly reaching the essence of what it is like to be squeezed into a box – leaving behind identity, self-worth & spirit.
Squeeze Box is a hybrid experiment which transfers creative/non-creative spaces into an antechamber of expression, individuality & togetherness. A multifaceted audience experience, heightened by live interventions, transforms space from huddles of welcoming conversation to full-blooded immersion in: projections, moving walls, soundscapes, medical equipment, props, manipulating communication ‘aids’ clashing with voice; creating emotional battles from joy to despair, desolation to solidarity. Participants can place themselves: right in the middle like a mosh pit of creative expression, shift either side of the fourth wall or more conventionally from the outside looking in. Both narrative/content & participation in the protest against ableist structures enables vital conversations on whose voice is heard and to what extent cuts in social care/care packages have on communities & society.
Created and performed by: Hugh Malyon, Steve Sowden and Tim Dollimore
Performed with BSL by: Emma Jane Mansfield
Dramaturgical support by: Sam Parker and Jennifer Noice
Produced by: Shelley Hodgson
Artistic Support and Access Consultant by: Clair Sargeant
…with support from Quarantine and Filament
Associate Artist:
Susan Norton-turner, Kerry Leigh Juhren and Emi Boswell
Special Thanks to:
Outside eyes and Friends: Amy Mellows, Erin Walcon, Fran Daykin
Daisy Mai Higman and Ruby Woods - Access Consultant
Film & documentation; Tristan Albon
Support and Brilliance with the workshops in Manchester: Winona Guy
Everyone who came on the 1st September 23 - your support and feedback was invaluable
Technical support from The Media Workshop & QED Productions
Susan Norton-turner’s See the able, Not the Label exhibition in an art gallery during Squeeze Box’s takeover in MakeTank. Two more associate artists platformed work in March 24 when SqBx took over the Liberal Club, Paignton
A flavour of Squeeze Box - Two clips giving a peak into the rollercoaster 3-dimensional understanding of disability within a Squeeze Box
Heightened misery as a disembodied voice demands answers to questions which should never be asked - Hugh, what are you worth?
The work focuses on/celebrates neurodiversity & was a positive supplement to Squeeze Box, which is rooted in lived experience of physical disability.
With Hugh’s impairment, raw emotions are so much hard to hide. Tell Hugh a joke, and he literally can’t help but laugh. In this state which values individuality, joy is… Well, just a bit more joyful!
The accompanying video (taken August 2021, R&D) gives insight into our creative process, accessing the work through both the eyes and the cameras of 3 artists. Their individual views inspire interactive improv into each and every piece alongside the base structure of the rehearsal. These captures show visually some of the content being created but allows witness of individual viewing - generating both a place of privilege and creating the Russian doll effect as you are viewing someone viewing what you are viewing – this is both integral to the process and is an aesthetic that Squeeze Box is exploring.
Funders, Partners, Supportive Organisations and people to say thank you too
Instrumental to SqBx/embedded collaborators
2023 - with an Arts Council England Project Grant, Squeeze Box took over the MakeTank creative space, Exeter, with performance, workshop and live public spaces durationals. As part of this project, we collaborated with Longsight Arts Space/ Proforma to develop disability as positive identity workshops in Manchester. The resilience, structure and power of Squeeze Box came to fruition, with embedded relationship with Far Flung/a meaningful focus on access throughout our process, a dedicated producer and weaving a BSL interpreter into the performance and wider work.
The success of the MakeTank takeover led to a week residency at Battersea Arts Centre, supported by Another Route and Jerwood Arts.
2021 - during the limbo time of easing Covid restrictions but caution around social distance, and how we best care for each other, Squeeze Box was given time and space to play at Cockington Court. This R&D marked the first time Steve, Tim and Hugh came together to play and experiment. ACE supported, an emergence of sound, performance and projection materialised, depicting a 3-dimensional view of disability to capture the essence of being human - care, emotion, community and celebration of identity. Having free-range of Cockington Court saw the foundation of this work being realised from, large scale projections on a manor house to a full bloodied jam in a converted corn barn.
Continue reading to learn about how R&D brought our concept to life
March 2024 - Squeeze Box artist undertook a week-long residency to build on the momentum of MakeTank and BAC, learn more about how we work together, deepen our care centred practise and create a springboard for feature tours. This was supported as part of Wide Open, a new creative and cultural programme in Paignton, Torbay. Please click on the Wide Open badge to see all partners who make this work possible.
An R&D exploration of our new work ‘Squeeze Box’: combining performance, visual projection, soundscape and live bodies; challenging toxic narratives of disability at a time when everyone's movements have been restricted throughout this global pandemic.
When was the last time you felt like all the air had been sucked out of you?
This process covered March till November 21 and the experiments, achievements, joy and anger, connection with audience (both in space and online), knowledge gained and content generated was awe-inspiring. Our process concluded with two sharings with critical friends and fellow artists – he first being in live space and the second being a hybrid improv performance, using live multi-media techniques in virtual space.
Audience Relationship: how do we negotiate space together – physical, theoretical, virtual, shared, private?
If we are truly to take someone on a journey, we need agreement on both sides on what form that experience will take. Quite quickly, it was evidenced that a passive, sit down and be quiet when the lights go down wasn’t the way we wanted (or indeed needed) the audience to experience Squeeze Box.
Squeeze Box aims to negotiate some quite sticky territory, raw lived experience that is both personal and universal. The way these memories have manifested is through a totally underfunded medical/social system bogged down by systematic ableism and bureaucracy, by both the political sphere and communities who do not have to engage with it.
Process: ‘Let’s do an hour Zoom, you know what we’re like, we’ll get lost in grand ideas and the theoretical constructs of…’ – Cat Radford, Squeeze Box R&D producer
With process happening during covid restrictions, Zoom offered instant ways to communicate, connect and devise together – to efficiently schedule and share content and ideas, talk through logistics and lay the groundworks for Squeeze Box. Much wisdom and genius was shared during these Zooms, inspiring and challenging practise. In the comfort of homes/studios etc, it was easy to allow ideas to walk freely from just a few pages of early concepts, multiple mind map documents and graphics were conjured. Ideas spun from lived experience and previous projects to theoretical spaces, straying far from the nuts and bolts of practical exploration and Zoom fatigue. These ideas need to be valued and played with in space.
Playing in Space: projection can make any building a canvas – soundscapes can make any environment an installation.
The feel or essence of an environment or building plays an important role in artistic structure, adding and weaving more dimensions. Cockington Court and grounds are a publicly owned country park and a happy accident led our R&D there. The sublime, peaceful setting of Cockington may have countered the harsh, raw topics explored in Squeeze Box. Yet, it is also possible the opposite happened creating a unique juxtaposition – this same juxtaposition as the bloody and turmoil history of Cockington, hidden by lush green and peaceful nature. There’s a certain tranquillity even when sound penetrates and the idea of harm or danger is not palpable there, giving a solid and safe foundation. Cockington always has a feeling of hidden secrets that are yet to be uncovered and those secrets could be infinite with artistic expression
Contextualisation: part of Squeeze Box’s job is to allow audiences to have an emotional, visual and aural relationship with the models of disability – which are, in themselves problematic – why do you need models to understand a disabled body and not other identities?
There are two main lenses in which to view disability, the Social Model, emerging as a protest to the outdated, yet still prevalent, Medical Model. More recently, a new (both arguably more progressive and a backward step) lens has been proposed, the Affirmation Model. These models, or ways of understanding (or ‘othering’) sit between the lived and the academic and Squeeze Box explores ways to connect the two. Combining a deep dive into Hugh’s world and workshops with disabled individuals from CEDA helps understand what disability is and what is important to those who are labelled as such. Discourses include being listen to and lied to, disability as a performance and how society values or disempowers diversity.
The Creative Team: and their take on Squeeze Box
Steve Sowden – feeling a real privilege to pour rage into addressing these issues, Steve will work towards turning around the medical model by allowing people to feel the impact this model has and then facilitating a pushback against these themes – being proactive not reactive
Nathalie Palin – playing with ideas and metaphors of power in small boxes by critically analysing the process and providing subtleties to remind us all to continue to play with the personal and political
Cat Radford – will be going back to the creative process and working with both new and old people – the mastermind behind linking strings of this diverse group and the uncomfortable themes they explore and melding the two together
Tim Dollimore – will combine his many talents within this creative process. Bringing creativity together with his social interest in disability and passion for social psychology Tim wants to work towards changing big perspectives
Sam Parker – Utilising skills as a dramaturg, both in text and practically, Sam wants to ask good questions to push the boundaries and possibilities yet maintain narrative and cause.
Jen Noice – working on the subtleties and nuances that tell hard truths without affronting the audience – taking risks and enabling Hugh to build his practise in an honest and impactful way