IMPORTANT UPDATE REGARDING: 12 Last Songs

12 Last Songs, a partnership between Quarantine, Under the Radar, Working Theater, and La MaMa, originally scheduled to take place on January 17, has sadly been cancelled, in the truest sense of the phrase, “due to circumstances beyond our control.” Instead, we will be hosting A Worker’s Lunch at La MaMa this Saturday, January 17th from noon to 2:30pm.

Richard Gregory, Artistic Director of Quarantine and 12 Last Songs, has written a statement that reads, in part:

Quarantine’s midday to midnight performance of 12 Last Songs can’t happen. 10 of the members of our 13 person team don’t have their visas and we still don’t know why. US Citizenship and Immigration Services won’t confirm with us or anyone else why our petition has been paused, perhaps indefinitely. It might well be because two of our party were born in Nigeria and that, despite their British passports, that fact alone put a red flag on the application since Nigeria was recently added to the USA’s “restricted entry” list. Maybe our documentation is just on an impossibly large pile of applications. Who knows? Nobody will tell us. We’re incredibly frustrated and properly sad to not be able to present this work. We feel like it belongs in New York City.

We agree and we share Richard’s frustration. Under the Radar and La MaMa consistently platform international productions and have obtained visas for literally thousands of performers and crew members. We know how this process works… or at least how it has worked until now. It is important to us that our audiences understand that this cancellation is not indicative of any lack of commitment to bringing this work to the United States. It is simply a sad sign of our times, of an intentionally broken system.

12 Last Songs is a durational meditation on the interconnected nature of work. Over the span of half a day, Quarantine introduces the audience to 30 local laborers, pays them for their time, and provides them with a stage to demonstrate their trade and how they see the world. For their January show, the company and their NYC facilitators at Working Theater had already assembled an astonishing cross-section of New York City workers, including a midwife, an astrophysicist, a doorman, a dog groomer, a subway conductor, a sex worker and, ironically, an immigration lawyer. Our collaboration began back in March of 2025. Since then, we’ve exerted thousands of working hours to make this event a reality.

There is a reasonable impulse to simply mourn this cancellation and move on. That’s not our way. Instead, we do what we have always done: we adapt. We find strength and resilience with the help of our communities. We chart a new path, led by our artists. We start again.

In the process of making 12 Last Songs, Quarantine’s artists always serve a “worker’s dinner” to bring together the 30 laborers taking part in the performance. So, in that spirit, on January 17 between noon and 2:30pm at La MaMa we invited those who already had tickets to 12 Last Songs to share a meal. It won’t and can’t be 12 Last Songs, but the spirit of the work will remain.

In Solidarity,
Quarantine, Under the Radar, Working Theater, and La MaMa

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Quarantine is an award-winning ensemble of artists and producers making cross-disciplinary work that explores what it means to live right now. Founded in 1998 in Manchester, UK, they create and tour projects around the world that are both intimate and immediate in their relationships with people and global in their reference and scope. Quarantine has an international reputation for intellectually rigorous, socially progressive and formally inventive art that questions who gets seen, whose stories are told and who stands in for whom – questions about representation lie at the heart of their work.