Quarantine

15/05/2026

We’ve published a tribute on our website to our collaborator and friend Mike Brookes, who died in the first week of May, written by Quarantine’s Co-Artistic Director Richard Gregory.

Mike was an integral and essential part of Quarantine’s work and story from the very beginning, 28 years ago. In production credits, he was our Lighting Designer, yet of course, as with all good and complex collaborations, the role, relationship and contribution was both that and so much more...

He leaves a gap that can’t be filled and we’ll miss him terribly.

Our thoughts and love are with Mike’s partner Rosa, his family in Sheffield, his daughters and all his friends and collaborators.

The full tribute is on our website: https://qtine.com/notebook/mike-brookes-1965-2026/

15/04/2026

This May, we’re hosting No Such Thing in Rochdale, continuing a series we began in 2025 in collaboration with Touchstones Rochdale.

We’ll be hosting four editions across the year.

After our most recent version in London, one guest shared this feedback: ‘It made my week! I’ve had a rough one and was missing meaningful interaction.…so everything aligned in the most beautiful way today! I’m eternally grateful for this extraordinary event, and for your generosity’.

Read more about No Such Thing: https://qtine.com/work/no-such-thing/

09/04/2026

A Public Address: in pictures 📸

Alongside A Public Address, in partnership with Battersea Arts Centre - BAC and Welcome to Wandsworth – London Borough of Culture 2025-26, we commissioned local photographer Steve Reeves to take a series of photos of people in the borough.

On our website we've selected a series of these images, to sit alongside portraits taken as part of The people of Lavender Hill, and documentation of the performances themselves.

🔗 https://qtine.com/notebook/a-public-address-in-pictures/

📸 Vincent, part of Quarantine’s The people of Lavender Hill, 2026. Photo: Kate Daley
📸 Quarantine, 12 Last Songs, at Battersea Arts Centre, 2026. Photo: Ewan Michael Riley
📸 Hiranya, part of Quarantine’s The people of Lavender Hill, 2026. Photo: Kate Daley
📸 Quarantine, Why I am and why I am not: Part 1: The Balcony, at Battersea Arts Centre, 2026. Photo: Ewan Michael Riley
📸 Quarantine, Why I am and why I am not: Part 2: The Rooms, at Battersea Arts Centre, 2026. Photo: Ewan Michael Riley
📸 Mr and Mrs Black, speakers in Why I am and why I am not. Photo: Steve Reeves

02/04/2026

‘Quarantine’s recent takeover of Battersea Arts Centre ... peeled back the chaos of London to let people, stories, lives draw breath.’
– Maddy Costa, Exeunt Magazine

‘Quarantine’s work has always quietly and determinedly poked at essential questions: what are we all doing here? How do we spend our days?’ – Stevie Mackenzie-Smith, Battersea Arts Centre - BAC writing commission

‘gently absorbing, kind, respectful and real’ – Sara West, Everything Theatre

Both sprawling and intimate – with its many parts, forms and scales, our Battersea Arts Centre takeover A Public Address is difficult to sum up.

In March, BAC published a piece of writing by Stevie Mackenzie-Smith that sketches the shape of the work, its various components and how they were each connected and distinct.

🔗 Read online: https://bac.org.uk/reflections-on-a-public-address/

📸

1. Quarantine, Why I am and why I am not: Part 2: The Rooms, at Battersea Arts Centre, 2026. Photo: Ewan Michael Riley
2. Quarantine, 12 Last Songs, at Battersea Arts Centre, 2026. Photo: Ewan Michael Riley
3. Quarantine, Why I am and why I am not: Part 1: The Balcony, at Battersea Arts Centre, 2026. Photo: Ewan Michael Riley
4. Michael, part of Quarantine’s The people of Lavender Hill, 2026. Photo: Kate Daley

27/02/2026

Today we’re delighted to publish a new book by UoM Humanities social and cultural geographer Dr Amy Barron on our website.

📖 Age on the Stage: Staging Age Through Creative Encounter in Telescope by Quarantine

According to a report by social enterprise United for all Ages, Britain is now one of the most age-segregated countries in the world.

Our performance Telescope began with the idea of creating a situation that brought a young person – someone on the cusp of adulthood – into an encounter with an older person, a complete stranger.

🔭 Recruited from two age groups: young adults aged roughly 18-25, navigating their first steps into adulthood, and older adults aged around 60-70, Quarantine invited people to lend them an object that would form the starting point for a series of public conversations at Manchester Museum.

During the making and performance of Telescope, we were joined by Amy who was invited to produce an evaluation in response to the project (with a very open-ended brief!).

Amy’s resulting publication brings together photographs, illustrations, her beautifully written vignettes capturing the encounters that took place, and quotes from interviews she held with the lenders who took part in the performance of Telescope.

The book captures the power not only of bringing together people who would not otherwise meet, across different ages and positions, but also the power of bringing together different disciplines – here, geography and performance.

It’s a beautiful portrait of what unfolded during our time making Telescope at Contact and presenting it at Manchester Museum last October.

We implore you to take a look!

✏️ Illustrations by Sam Bonser
📸 Photographs by Solomon Hughes and Mark Frost
🖌️ Designed and typeset by Lisa Mattocks

🔗 Read here: https://qtine.com/news/staging-age-a-geographers-take-on-intergenerational-encounter-in-telescope/

19/02/2026

A Public Address began today with No Such Thing. 🎉

Taking place around, throughout and from the balcony of Battersea Arts Centre - BAC, A Public Address – part of Welcome to Wandsworth's London Borough of Culture Year – is a Quarantine takeover that draws on our 28-year history of dismantling conventions and collaborating with all kinds of people.

🍽️ The takeover kicks off with No Such Thing, taking place at four cafes over four weeks.

No Such Thing is a framework for conversation between 2 people who might not otherwise meet: an ephemeral encounter between strangers, shaped, experienced, and remembered by those 2 people alone.

The offer is simple: we buy you lunch in exchange for a short conversation. Starting with a menu of questions, we talk about what’s happening in the world, in our lives and stuff that’s playing on our minds. There’s always a ‘Today’s Special’ from that day’s news.

🌍 From its beginnings in 2012 in a curry cafe in Manchester, No Such Thing has gone on to tour the world – with iterations across the UK; in Istanbul, Turkey; Cairo, Egypt and multiple German cities.

🎟️ We're delighted that this edition of No Such Thing is fully booked – but there are still tickets available for the other three strands of A Public Address.

Head to BAC's website for more info: https://bac.org.uk/whats-on/a-public-address/

📸 Kate Daley

19/01/2026

14/01/2026

Quarantine’s midday to midnight performance, 12 Last Songs – due to be performed in New York as part of Under The Radar Festival at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club on Saturday – can’t happen.

In the moment when leaders and tankers are seized and sovereign nations are seen as up for grabs, as daily restrictions and infringements on the freedom of movement of people saturate our news and drench the lives of those fleeing war or famine or climate catastrophe or simply heading somewhere to work at making a better life, and when state-sanctioned masked men shoot whistle-blowers, the plight of a bunch of artists who live in the UK and would like to be in New York, pales into an insignificant glimmer.

And yet of course these things are connected.

10 of the 13 Quarantine artists and producers going to present 12 Last Songs in New York don’t have their visas. We still don’t factually know why – the US Citizenship and Immigration Services won’t tell us why our petition for entry has been paused, perhaps indefinitely. It might well be because 2 of our party were born in Nigeria and that, despite their British passports, that fact alone is enough to put a red flag on the application. Who knows.

We’re incredibly frustrated and properly sad to not be able to present the work in New York.
It’s a piece we love to make and we feel like it belongs in that city.

We’ve spent 8 months working with the brilliant, passionate and committed teams at Under the Radar (how do so few people achieve so much???) and the singular Working Theater planning, measuring, organising, collaborating. The last 4 of those 8 months were focused on finding 30 workers in New York to do a paid shift during the 12 hours of the show. We’ve spoken to midwives, astrophysicists, doormen, dog groomers, marching band leaders, wigmakers, community gardeners, ex-drug dealers, bouncy castle technicians and, appropriately, an immigration lawyer....

But, the show won’t happen. To honour the work put into this ninth, not-quite-made edition of 12 Last Songs, we’re hosting ‘A Worker’s Lunch’, open to all, on Saturday at La MaMa instead.

🔗 A full statement, with more details about our invitation to gather, is on our website: https://qtine.com/news/12-last-songs-new-york-an-update/

📸 Kate Daley

27/11/2025

For this Saturday's The Art of Assembly, Sajad Habibi, Darren O’Donnell, and Cecile Sandten will be in conversation responding to the idea of what makes a city.

⍰ How could our cities look if they were not still mainly designed around the needs and imaginations of Western white men?

⍰ What if urban planning began with the perspectives of children, the elderly, migrants, and those who are usually planned for — but rarely listened to?

ℹ️ The speakers ℹ️

Sajad Habibi, expert resident elected to the Migration Advisory Board of Chemnitz, brings perspectives from migrant and refugee communities into urban policy and representation.

Artist and theatre maker Darren O’Donnell discusses how participatory models that centre children and intergenerational exchange can change the social fabric.

Literary scholar Cecile Sandten understands cities as palimpsests, in which overlapping spatial and representational layers reveal processes of change, power, and interpretation within urban space.

📆 Sat 29 Nov, 16.00 CET
📍 Museum Gunzenhauser / Chemnitz
🎟️ Entry included in ticket to Museum Gunzenhauser

----
Hosted by Florian Malzacher.

This edition of The Art of Assembly is part of The Questions, a project by Quarantine, who are working with people across generations in twin cities Manchester and Chemnitz to explore what we value and why—both individually and as a society.
––

In collaboration with ASA-FF and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz
Part of Chemnitz 2025
In cooperation with Allianz Foundation
Supported by the British Council, Cultural Bridge, Manchester City Council and The Skelton Charity