The Machine Stops
One of our unique creative collaborations, showing every night at Hidden Door 2026
The Machine Stops is a celebration of factory life told as a mini symphony of words, pictures and noise in five short acts.
Recordings of former factory workers talking about life on the shop floor are punctuated by images of what was left behind after they clocked off for the final time. Industrial rhythms increase productivity until shutdown, and the last shift is over.
The Machine Stops is a collaboration between Neil Cooper, Luke Bell, Jill Boualaxai Martin, Andrew Dawson, Tom Flint and Paul McCluskey with the Sativa Drummers, and featuring the voices of Jim Scott, Marlyn Price and Debbie Bentley as the Signs.
The event includes material originally developed with Eszter Marsalkó and Stephanie Lamprea, with nods to Marguerite Duras and Glenn Gould.
About the Creative Collaborations
Threaded throughout the 2026 programme are a series of newly commissioned interdisciplinary collaborations and site-responsive works, waiting to be encountered by visitors as they explore The Paper Factory.
Artists, musicians, poets and performers have joined forces to create something unique for this year’s former factory space. Throughout the festival, recurring works and programme-wide collaborations inhabit the building’s “Last Shift”. Together, they build a shifting portrait of The Paper Factory, both real and imagined, through fragments of its past, present and possible futures.
This year’s festival explores how spaces and objects hold memory, and how traces of everyday activity become preserved, misremembered or reimagined over time.
Audiences will navigate the site as the programme unfolds around them. Unique experiences will be shaped through individual routes, encounters and personal perspectives. No single path will reveal the whole picture as works overlap and unfold throughout the building.
These recurring works and programme-wide collaborations will feature every night of the festival from Wednesday 3rd – Sunday 7th June.
