At the beginning of Quarantine’s performance Summer (2014), with the somehow impossibly stirring soundtrack of Mr Blue Sky, a huge bank of lights slowly appears and rises above the massive wall of cardboard boxes at the side of the stage, the shadow it casts shrinking away to light the room beyond it. A signal theatrical beginning, created with typically simple, stylish and ambitious vision by our symbiotic scenographic duo, Simon Banham and Mike Brookes.
There are, of course, people who one expects to be around forever, despite the reality of mortality. Mike, who died in the first week of May, was one of those. I took myself by surprise when I realised that we’d been working together for almost 30 years.
Mike’s work as an Associate Artist with Quarantine – and before that, when we collaborated at Northern Stage – was, on the list of old-fashioned production credits, that of Lighting Designer. And yet of course, as with all good and complex collaborations, the role, relationship and contribution was both that and so much more…
The vital and irreplaceable thing is that we knew what Mike would bring. Not in the specifics of what lanterns might be used or what ‘effects’ he might create – I can imagine the quizzical, near-withering look on his face if I’d used that word in relation to his work – but through an ontological approach to light and its relation to any particular space. Mike would talk of propositions being made – through what he brought to the whole of a piece of work and as a fundamental principle of the work itself. He lit the room rather than moments of action. He described elements rather than states. I always knew that he would make something that would be both functional and beautiful. And he was the master of the long, slow fade.
It was all of these qualities that Mike brought into Quarantine’s work – and it’s hard to imagine what we’ll do without him. But the biggest gap might well be those late-night conversations, perhaps the true crucible of creative problem-making and problem-solving – invariably fuelled with a glass or two of Rioja for Mike – working out what to do next, enjoying his own wryly amused impatience with mine and Simon’s performative bickering….
Mike’s artistic practice was rich and varied, from painting through diverse media to performance, and expressed through some extraordinary collaborations – that unique 20 year partnership with Mike Pearson (on paper, ‘Pearson/Brookes’, but widely referred to as the 2 Mikes); a set of fabulous projects with Stewart Laing and Untitled Projects and of course, since 2005, his rich vein of work with his partner in art and life, Rosa Casado.
Right now, it’s Rosa, his family in Sheffield and Mike’s daughters that I think of most. And I know that the next time we perform 12 Last Songs, the last piece that we collaborated on – in Mike’s words, a “performed lighting design” – that I shall think of him in the literal eleventh hour of that show, quietly, almost invisibly, walking discreetly around the periphery, turning the lights off one by one.
Richard Gregory, Co-Artistic Director, Quarantine