12 Last Songs

12 Last Songs is one of the festival’s biggest projects this year, with over thirty people showing up on stage. They are not actors - they are workers from our community. From noon until midnight, all sorts of people turn up for a shift, telling us about their work and how they see the world. A decorator decorates a wall, a singer sings, an astrophysicist tells us about the laws of the universe, a midwife reveals some truths about the birth of a new life …

This unusual, joyful and touching work gives us an opportunity to experience the diversity of Iceland today, meet people we don’t necessarily encounter in our everyday lives and ponder time and the universe while peeking through doors that are not usually open to us.

Critically acclaimed performance group Quarantine are based in Manchester but have travelled widely with their productions, known for revealing unexpected sides to human life. 12 Last Songs have been enthusiastically received by audiences and critics.

The production lasts 12 hours, admission is free and the audience are welcome to come and go as they like.

DIRECTOR'S NOTE 

One of the invisible markers of the shift into adulthood is perhaps when the question changes from ‘What do you want to be?’ to ‘What do you do?’….

Being and doing.  For many of us, our identity is somehow wrapped up - if only whilst we’re doing it - in the work that we do. 

Our work with Quarantine is a form of mass portraiture.  Brief, consciously imperfect fragments of live pictures of individuals, stitched together to make something bigger, messier and more grandly human.  Our job is to make the circumstances in which other people can, for a moment or two at least, present themselves. Part of our role as artists is to choose where to place the frame of the portrait for you to look through – so we try to show our hand, expose our means of production, to let you see just how we’re holding that frame…. 

So here we are, our first time in Reykjavik.  We learned early on, in our Zoom calls over the past months with the brilliant festival team and in our rehearsals last week with the 3 Icelandic performers, that there already exist so many connections in this city between people.  Pretty much everyone involved has some direct relationship with someone else – they went to kindergarten together, that woman is their mother-in-law, the priest buried their grandmother etc etc…. And yet 12 Last Songs does something else too – it scratches beneath the surface of everyday life to unearth a glimpse of the experience of each worker who appears today, and through that somehow to expose both what it is that makes each of us unique and, simultaneously, the common humanity that connects us all.

And across these 12 hours- as it might in life outside Harpa – we may well discover that difference enriches, rather than divides ...

Richard Gregory 
Director, 12 Last Songs 

Created by: Quarantine
Concept & direction: Richard Gregory
Designer: Simon Banham
Lighting Designer: Mike Brookes
Collaborating Artist & Assistant Director: Sarah Hunter
Collaborating Digital Artists: Lowri Evans & Lisa Mattocks
Questions text: Sarah Hunter, Leentje Van de Cruys & Quarantine
Dramaturgy: Renny O’Shea, Sarah Hunter & Leentje Van de Cruys
Performers: Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir, Kate Daley, Ólafur Ásgeirsson og Unnsteinn Manuel Stefánsson

Presented by Quarantine in association with Factory International.

In collaboration with Harpa Concert Hall.