Quarantine’s method of creating work always starts and ends with the people in the room… in the brand new studio space at HOME Richard and Renny gathered together some old faces and began to explore ideas around memory and self… how does looking back inform how we look forward, how does excavating who we have been allow us a glimpse of the selves we’re becoming?
These are the central questions of Quarantine’s latest work, the second installment of an epic quartet of performances dealing with our relationship with change.
Autumn. – a performance about looking backward to look forward – is twinned with Summer. – which is all about being alive, in this moment, right now. Together they form a pair of performances about how we live in the time we have, and how we choose to perceive it.
Winter. and Spring. are set to mirror one another in a similar way – two works – one which looks at a life coming to end and another about life at it’s very beginning. Death. Birth. Now… and either side of Now.
The people in the room bring their stories, quite literally, to the table. The first exercise of the afternoon challenges the collaborators to come up with small interactions designed to draw out memories and reveal something about the story-teller…
We shared photographs on our phones, in which whatever we wanted to capture was somehow hidden or lost – the swoop of a bird in flight, the movement of sand blowing over feet, a double rainbow in which only one rainbow had come out…
We emptied our wallets and decided what was truly valuable, what items we had in common (receipts, travel tickets, photos) and what we would be devastated to lose…
We tried to view ourselves through the eyes of others too, by trying to think of a song that other people would associate with us… first dances, silly dances and private dances…
This is only the beginning… Autumn. is still being made and won’t be finished until the lights go down at the end of every show. A performance about how our memories shape us – where the audience brings their histories to the table – will be different every time, according to the people in the room.
– Hannah Hiett
