The Cycle Is Complete

After the success of FIB, MBD was approached by promoters from both the street arts sector and the visual arts sector to create work for their own arts environments. With this in mind MBD decided to leave their theatre roots behind, and embarked on an incredibly ambitious and pretty exhausting programme of work called THE FOUR SEASONS…

It started with SPRING in 2005 and has finally reached its epic finale in 2011 with the premiere of SUMMER and the staging of all 4 seasons in Lincoln during Frequency Festival. http://frequency.org.uk/

Looking back I'm reminded of so many memories. The all nighter before the premiere of SPRING as we tried to build our first outdoor installation on SAND! Pushing an Austin Sprite through the streets of Leicester at 6am before we squeezed it through the City Gallery doors with only millimetres to spare. The howling gales during the get out of Winter in Winchester, and the late nights, early starts and endless road works as we commuted to Lincoln on a daily basis to install SUMMER.

But with the blood sweat and tears (and there really were blood sweat and tears!) we've had so many wonderful moments. I'll never tire of the many children running around SPRING getting squirted by water and sticking their heads into beehives. I'll always remember the subtlety of AUTUMN and how it connected with the homeless in Leicester. Winter was when the Four Seasons really started to take shape and offered a through line and over arching narrative. With Winter my memories will always be of how it really touched people. It's quite a strange feeling to make people genuinely cry. SUMMER is a true testament to collaboration. Alongside MBD's artistic directors are a group of associate artists and freelancers who work with us to help deliver the vision. Summer would not have been possible without creative input from Steve Gibbs, Kate Unwin, Motion Design and Margaret Reeves.

There were times when I think we all wanted to throw in the towel, but standing in Lincoln after visiting all 4 installations, I felt incredibly proud. Yes we could have done things differently, after all a lot of the journey was about learning. And yes I would have loved just a little more time and money so that everything was perfect but the essence of The FOUR SEASONS is there. With some seasons you have to hunt a little harder, but Polly's life and her connection with the mysterious Gwyn Penn is now finally complete and, although WINTER concludes the series, SPRING follows straight on to start the cycle over again.

And the question we are left with back at MBD HQ is…… What now? All I can say is I'm sure the lessons we learned from FOUR SEASONS will never leave us completely As Mr Penn tells young Polly in one of their discussions, things come back in different ways "Like Caterpillars and Butterflies".