12 Last Songs – January 17

A message for our audience,

“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.”

— Richard Gregory, Artistic Director of Quarantine and 12 Last Songs

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 always serve a “worker’s dinner” to bring together the 30 laborers taking part in the performance. So, with that intention, on January 17 between noon and 2:30pm at La MaMa we invite you to share a meal. Stop by for a few minutes or a couple of hours. There will be other fresh creations that we can’t describe just yet, as they are still in process, but be assured that there will be questions asked, good food eaten, and maybe even a bouncy house to enjoy. It won’t and can’t be 12 Last Songs, but the spirit of the work will remain as long as you are there to share it.

In Solidarity,

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