No Such Thing
For the last 5 years, every month in Kabana, Back Turner St, Manchester, Quarantine buy lunch in exchange for a conversation. A simple transaction, one to one. Each month has a different theme.
Each conversation marks a moment in time
A look round the café and everybody is doing the same as us – eating, talking – nothing here says ‘performance’.
No Such Thing is whatever people want to talk about regardless of the official theme and can be funny, banal, memorable, dull and thought provoking, as any conversation.
Conversations are not documented in any way except untrustworthy memory, but something lingers from the whole of them - markers of truths in a fake news world.
All photographs by Kate Daley 2016.
Images courtesy of Kate Daley and Quarantine.
Renny OShea is co-artistic director of Quarantine, an artist-led company creating theatre, performance and other public events which are experimental in form and approach. Quarantine present work in the UK and internationally, at arts venues and festivals - also in public spaces such as train station platforms, and market halls. They have made 30 original pieces of work of varying scale: including family parties, karaoke booths, cookery lessons, radio broadcasts, reading rooms and journeys in the dark for one person at a time – as well as performances on stage for audiences in seats. Their productions are made with and about the people in them. Performers in previous works have included philosophers, florists, opera singers, refugees and asylum seekers, families, older people, unemployed young men, soldiers, dancers, writers, technicians and more. Central to each project is an interest in exploring, and creating the circumstances for conversation about the complexities and contradictions of lived experience.