An experimental, live sound and projection installation about the disabled experience
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 shopfront, Barfield theater and Battersea Art Center and other spaces from 2023-2026, 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. This is punctuated by hard hitting imagery and absurd performs , 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, immersive set-design, soundscapes, medical equipment, labyrinth of waiting lists, bleary-eyed caseworkers and tangling red tape; 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.
A flavour of our initial R&D 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?
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!