Funders’ requirements for clear evidence of the importance of arts-based community engagement often require a dramatic paradigm shift for creative practitioners. Ellen Richardson, Michael J. Flexer, Hugh Malyon and Jennifer Noice discuss new ways of evaluating artistic interventions.
This article (part one of two) marks the beginning of an experiment into some “potential future worldings” for the evaluation of artistic practice (Springgay 2022, 4). We are doing this not (just) because it brings joy but because we consider it intellectually, artistically and ethically valuable. Specifically, we wish to apply (post)qualitative thought (Lather and St. Pierre 2013) to critique the demands funders make of creative engagements to provide heavily quantitative, numerical, systematic and reproducible data for their evaluations. At the outset we pose these two questions:
- How can medical humanities scholars learn from and support the work of disability-activist art to enable engaged research?
- Can we, then, apply feminist new materialism to Squeeze Box – a live installation theatre piece – to develop new, diffractive ways of evaluating artistic interventions, and rethink through what ‘data’ might encapsulate as a material-discursive phenomenon?
We, Ellen and Michael, had the great privilege of being part of Squeeze Box’s process, both before and during their residency at the Barnfield Theatre, Exeter, in October last year. Although we didn’t have time to put our evaluation into practice, our engagement led to us thinking up a possible ‘toolkit’ of creative evaluation methods. We believe the ideas developed from our creative collaboration are valuable, exciting, and should be discussed and developed for future creative arts grant applications. In this blog, we present a background to Squeeze Box and how we have applied feminist new materialism to enable critical, ethical evaluation for arts engagements.
About Squeeze Box
Squeeze Box is a disability-activist collaborative process led by Hugh Malyon, a disabled artist and performer based in the South West. Squeeze Box transcends toxic narratives of disability. As Hugh says on his website, he invites audiences into:
arrestive dialogues, laced with humour, discomfort and commonality. Rejecting narratives of ‘pity’, I am inspired by impaired bodies & minds as canvases of universal experience, beauty, care & empathy.
(Malyon 2025)
The performance explores themes of disability, personhood, community and identity, and how these are ripped apart by capitalist structures, such as social care support and benefits assessments, particularly the dehumanising processes behind the Personal Independence Payment (PIP). Squeeze Box seeks to create an accessible space in the theatre, to discuss and challenge complex and difficult topics that have very real and restrictive implications for individuals’ everyday lives, while also being a fun and caring environment that welcomes all. This is a tricky balancing act considering that the topics explored might hold traumatic memories or painful ongoing experiences for many of the performers and audience members. Squeeze Box has specifically hosted invite-only performances for groups who access support services in the South West, as well as for academics working in neurodiversity and disability studies.
Tackling funders’ expectations
We became involved in Squeeze Box when we were invited to join the rehearsal and project development space to explore and co-design evaluation techniques that would be accessible and creative, while ensuring the data could support future funding applications. No easy task. It’s well documented that funders’ expectations for clear evidence of the importance of arts-based community engagement often require a dramatic paradigm shift (Pate 2004).
There’s much debate, led by (post)qualitative scholars, critiquing the way in which qualitative research is continually held to quantitative research goals – for example, reliability, reproducibility, rigour, systematicity, and triangulation (Lather and St. Pierre 2013). This is particularly acute within the arts, where evaluation norms demand data ill-suited to the projects being evaluated. While it’s critical to have data on participation numbers and budget spending, standard feedback forms – that offer restrictive questions, demand handwriting or digital access and skills – can be exclusionary and account for limited forms of communication. They are also extremely boring. Naturally people avoid completing them. When it comes to disability (justice) theatre, there is a strong argument that research (and by extension evaluation) cannot ethically be enacted on groups (extracting data). Rather it needs to be co-produced through engaged approaches that are adaptable to diverse contexts (Hole and Schnellert 2024; Fine and Torre 2021).
A praxis of care, accessibility and identity
First, some background on Squeeze Box’s praxis of care, accessibility, and identity. Hugh and his team produce high quality, accessible, and community-engaged art. The performances and workshops are engaging, intra-active entanglements of bodies, meanings, technologies, audio, and images (Barad 2007), conflating the boundaries between socio-professional categories of performers, audience members, producers, BSL performance-interpreters, artists, academics. We use Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action to consider the ways in which none of these phenomena are distinct, pre-existing parts of the performance; instead, each moving part develops and entangles with the others to produce unique and evolving outcomes for every show and simultaneously re-form the very phenomena which are entangling in the process.
Squeeze Box invites educational organisations, disabled artists, and support service groups to access the workshops and learn about the process behind the production, play with the creative technology and craft materials, and become involved in the performative development of the show. Squeeze Box does not begin and end therefore with the scheduled hour-long performance, but unravels and re-winds itself in various directions as it becomes tangled with diverse community groups and creative explorations. The notions of unravelling and re-winding are material-discursive – this was very literally embodied by our collective play with a ball of wool in rehearsal. The artists-choreographers-performers-academics Clair Sargeant and Jade Ward brought a ball of wool to be thrown and passed between us to explore the entanglements at play in the team, establishing a material metaphor for the inextricable movement of care between individuals that creates complex and meaningful connections.
As academics, working with Squeeze Box is a wonderful opportunity to explore how care can be enacted in practice, relationally, and responsively. Busselle, Kaplan, and Yates (2022, 14), building upon the work of feminist care theorist Joan C Tronto, argue that “care work is a practice rather than an emotion, principle, or virtue” and thus can be applied to art as a practice, which is never a stable, finished product. As feminist researchers, we’re particularly drawn to the ways Squeeze Box establishes exemplary feminist care ethics, enabling space for the creative exploration of diffraction (Barad 2007) in how we theorise identity, value, and collaboration. The term diffraction, stemming from physics, emphasises the many varied patterns and shapes that difference might take, in contrast to ‘reflection’, which implies the reproduction of one originary object. In this way, diffraction enables us to think beyond binary, hierarchical conceptualisations of difference and instead consider the different differences that might be possible in research, praxis, art, and identity (see also Trinh T. Minh-ha 1988; Haraway 1992).
Rooms of care-full performativity
The artists created spaces of care within and around the theatre that diffracted the notion of performance as something contained within a single space and time. Rather, various rooms throughout the theatre were opened and filled with care-full performativity:
- The performance and workshop space – filled with diverse creative technologies, musical instruments, and craft materials to be playfully entangled with the visual potentials of an overhead projector.
- The creative room – full of artworks crafted by previous audience members exploring what identity means to them as well as fresh materials calling to be similarly played with. There were piles of brightly coloured card with questions thinking through what the self means, who gets to decide on this, and how we might like to perform our own identities.
- The breakout room – where anyone feeling the need of a quiet space could go and attend to their thoughts and feelings. The room was darker, the blinds drawn, with a gentle, peaceful mood established with fairy lights and soothing blue disco balls. For those experiencing overwhelm, industrial-grade ear protection was available. Here was a space for escape and recovery, perhaps; for some quiet self-care. As Squeeze Box covers intense topics that can be distressing and upsetting, spaces like this feel necessary and ask the question: why are these too often (nearly always!) absent from conventional theatre setups? While there’s increasing evidence for the value of sensorily-engaging quiet spaces for soothing mental distress, that these spaces are not permanent fixtures in theatres and other venues is arguably an example of ableism through absence.
Squeeze Box is powerful in its material imagining of the ways in which space, theatre, and communities might be made differently. You can find out more about Squeeze Box, explore some clips from recent installations, read Hugh’s blog, and keep up to date with future performance dates at hughmalyon.live, where you can also find all credits and thanks to Squeeze Box’s partners and funders.
NIHR Disclaimer:
Ellen Richardson’s role in this project is funded by the NIHR Pre-doctoral Fellowship (Ref: NIHR304791). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Social Care.
About the authors
Ellen Richardson is a post-graduate research associate at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health where she explores the use of creative and arts-based methodologies for health research. She is a medical humanities scholar with particular interest in the use of zines and craft-based methods for grounding new materialist theories through praxis.
Michael J. Flexer is the co-director for public engagement at the Centre of Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. He is a mad studies and disability studies scholar, and semiotician (no, really).
Hugh Malyon is a disabled artist based in the South West who is directly challenging categorisation through re-writing notions of what is disabling about being disabled. His work sits between theatre, performance, dialogue, live art and digital media.
Jennifer Noice is a creative enabler, writer and facilitator who has worked alongside Hugh for eight years. She has combined academic and creative works to delve into understanding the human condition and how small gestures can be used to build a more caring society.
References
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Busselle, Kate, Erin Kaplan and Samuel Yates. 2022. “The ethics of care in pedagogy and performance: Intersections with disability justice, intimacy work, and theatre of the oppressed.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 37(1): 13-28.
Fine, Michelle and María Elena Torre. 2021. Essentials of Critical Participatory Action Research. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Haraway, Donna. 1992. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler, 295-337. New York: Routledge.
Hole, Rachelle D. and Leyton Schnellert. 2024. “Disability Theatre as Critical Participatory Action Research: Lessons for Inclusive Research.” Social Sciences 13(2): 116.
Lather, Patti and Elizabeth A. St. Pierre. 2013. “Introduction: Post-Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26(6): 629-633.
Malyon, Hugh. 2025. About. Available online at https://hughmalyon.live/about. Accessed 04/02/2025.
Pate, Maldwyn. 2004. “Measuring the Immeasurable? A Critical Response to the Way Arts Funding Bodies Evaluate the Work of Arts Organisations.” PhD Thesis. Brunel University. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/5325
Springgay, Stephanie. 2022. Feltness: Research-Creation, Socially Engaged Art, and Affective Pedagogies. Durham: Duke University Press.
Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1988. “Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference.” Inscriptions 3-4. Received from https://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/inscriptions/volume-34/trinh-t-minh-ha/. Accessed 6th February 2025.
