Last week I spent a day in my flat with all of the windows open for the first time this year, making a through draught. Spring has sprung.
And I’ve been reflecting on being part of making Summer. Autumn. Winter. Spring. The norm for me after making the first version of a new piece is to harbour some kind of dissatisfaction. This isn’t a negative reaction. Maybe it’s the wrong word. Yet over the years I’ve learned that I need to give shelter to feelings of incompleteness, to think about the unexpected things that present themselves when the work meets a public, to mull over what to do with it next…
Summer. Autumn. Winter. Spring. was long in the coming. It started on a run by the sea in West Cork and ended up on a massive sound stage at the old Granada television studios. I wonder why I remember where this idea began? Usually I don’t. And yet, over Easter just gone, there it was: 3 performances and a film, played out over a 7 hour period, with hundreds of people in a room spending a day together, thinking about the shape of a life. We spent about 3 years working on the quartet and now it exists. The work is ripe for its next iterations.
And alongside that maybe-mislabeled dissatisfaction, there’s another strong feeling – a sense of great pride in what our brilliant, committed-beyond-the-call-of-duty, small-but-perfectly-formed team managed to achieve. We made a bar. We made a theatre. We fed 60 people a day (sometimes twice). We made three performances and a film. We made a massive event. We made something that all sorts of people came along to and responded to in all sorts of ways. We made something that all sorts of people came along to and responded to in all sorts of ways. We like doing these things together. I’m proud to be part of that.
– Richard Gregory, co-aritistic director, Quarantine
