DYNAMITE ISLAND’S DYNAMITE ISLAND
(2019–)

Our eponymous project was intended to be a live music-theatre show about care, creativity and camaraderie in the age of hyper-individualism, developed through a series of residencies in 2020.

Faced with the increasing demands of everyday life — to be productive, to realise your potential, to be yourself — it dealt with four performers (and real-life friends) attempting to help each other the only way they knew how: by writing each other songs to sing, dances to dance, and speeches to deliver.

Through this increasingly dense web of commissions, gifts and tribute acts, the ensemble would enlist the audience’s help in a multi-dimensional exploration of 21st-century friendship, the history of self-help, the future of mutual aid, and the role of music in teaching us how to live.

Following the advent of Covid, the project took on another dimension: developing into a method of remote collaboration that would help us respond to isolation and uncertainty. It remains a valuable strand in our shared practice.