A new joint production between Quarantine, Home and Contact Theatre may well be one of the last performances at the Granada Studios.
Featuring pregnant women, live cooking shows and a film documentary following the thoughts of a dying women,Summer.Autumn.Winter and Spring is an epic quartet of works from Manchester based theatre Company Quarantine which will comprise three live performances and a marathon day long event featuring sixty performers “real people as actors.”
Ahead of the demolition of the Old Granada Studios and its replacement by the new five this and capacity Factory Site, the production which Richard Gregory, Co Artist Director at Quarantine said, grew out of that was looking at something that represented the human lifestyle, existed in four seperate parts and would evolve into a marathon piece and could exist in different forms but in the same physical space, will look at the four seasons as a piece of mass portraiture dealing with the human life cycle.
Summer will explore our relationship with time, asking questions such as, do we dwell in the past,exist in the present or look to the future?
Premiered back in 2014 at Salford’s Islington Warehouse, thirty seven performers will respond to questions and instructions projected onto a screen, there will also be live writing taking place.
Autumn will see the audience joining the stage, exploring numerous questions about our place in the world, including a conversation about the history of the world, an ungoing game of table tennis, a clairvoyant, a library, philosophy and preparation of food.
Winter will maybe the most controversial of the four pieces.It will see the premier of a film directed by Rachel Davis, made with someone who is coming to the end of their life.
Mandy, who lives in York, has terminal lung cancer. Partially funded by the Wellcome trust, Mandy feels that it is a positive and that she can leave some form of legacy behind for her two children but obviously leaves some ethical questions.
It will, Richard hopes, have an openess, her own specific experience, and will be more documentary in approach than the other three segments.
While Spring looks forward to a new birth, nine local women at various stages of pregnancy. Seven of the women are pregnant for the first time and bar one will be twenty five to thirty weeks into their pregnancy when the performance starts.
Quarantine was named Home’s first associate Company back in August 2015, and in eighteen years has produced thirty original pieces of work that have been performed at family parties, as an encyclopaedia, as dance marathons and cookery lessons.Perhaps best remembered in Manchester for its no thing project, buying a stranger a curry in Kabana cafe.
