As part of our Elevate Festival, we are providing a local theatre company with space and support to spend some time making. In an arts landscape that can feel dominated by outputs and outcomes, this is an opportunity for selected artists to prioritise their process and creative risk taking.
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Squeeze Box is a creative organism, a mycelium of makers, who support the artistic vision and disabled-led practice of Hugh Malyon.
Their process allows them to understand the power of humanity more deeply, whilst developing together and growing as a care-centred transdisciplinary collective.
Squeeze Box opens direct conversation on care as a universal experience through installation, performance and workshop.
Photo by South West Theatre Photography
Photo by South West Theatre Photography
Who’s Who: Live Performers
Hugh Malyon is a disabled performer transcending toxic narratives of disability, showcasing impairment through beauty, care, empathy, voice amplification, process and protest.
Steve Sowden co-creates narrative through soundscapes and a live score, using sampled, looped, pre-recorded, improv and instrumental sounds.
Tim Dollimore is a Creative Technologist crafting stage works and experiences, bringing a deep understanding of performance technology to bear in productions of all sizes.
Emma Jane Mansfield is a professional British Sign Language/English interpreter and translator specialising in performance, music and theatre. She is a singer-songwriter musician and teddy bear artist who has performed a huge range of theatre shows, festivals, music gigs and workshops.
Who’s Who: Facilitators and artist support
Clair Sargeant is a Plymouth-based neurodivergent movement and theatre artist. Clair is a co-director of Far Flung CIC and specialises in disability arts practice and access consultancy for theatre.
Jennifer Noice’s knowledge and understanding of how Hugh and the Squeeze Box team works creatively informs her role, which oversees many aspects of Squeeze Box and shapes the core of care within the team and for those who enter the performance space.
Shelley Hodgson is a creative producer of socially engaged projects across the South West, specialising in projects that platform a diversity of voices across society. She has recently performed at SOAK in Plymouth with collaborator Mark Leahy and is a collaborator with Room To Manoeuvre.
Photo by South West Theatre Photography
Photo by South West Theatre Photography
WHAT THEY’LL BE WORKING ON
During their residency, Squeeze Box will be working on a participatory blend of live performance, soundscape and projection about the disabled experience. This live sound/projection installation explores: harsh realities of labels and austerity spontaneously interrupted by improv, interactions, popcorn sharing and bad dad jokes.
Their residency will culminate in an invite-only sharing, bringing together radical tech, lo-fi instruments, workshop and the artist’s voice to create space to play, engage and reflect. Audiences will be invited into an intimate space to bear witness to Hugh’s exploration of how his lived experience of disability is distorted beyond recognition by dehumanising systems of assessment.
In this unrelenting Orwellian and Kafkaesque ‘Squeezebox’, where identity, self-worth and spirit must be left behind, Hugh aims to lead the charge to demand empathy in systems that squeeze us into boxes!
ELEVATE MASTERCLASS – ACCESS AND CARE IN THE REHEARSAL ROOM
Squeeze Box is developing a takeover model including workshops, performance, installations and interventions. The concept delves into what being disabled means to each of us and how to create a more accessible community.
The Squeeze Box team’s 60-minute invite-only immersive performance will be bookended by their welcome and a relaxed, workshop-style Q&A.
This event will be free and exclusively available to Elevate members.
FIND OUT MORE BECOME AN ELEVATE MEMBER
Photo by South West Theatre Photography
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