MUTUAL AID — A VIDEO OPERA
(in development)

Mutual Aid (working title) is a collaboratively composed video opera in four acts. Currently in post-production, it takes as its libretto a communal diary that Dynamite Island kept during the UK’s first lockdown, as well as songs and performances written for and with each other, documenting our attempts to construct for ourselves an autonomous imaginative space in which we might invent our own forms of togetherness, more intimate than ever before.

Drawing on DIY music videos and TikTok challenges as well as the work of Robert Ashley and other pioneers of the ‘video opera’ form, the resulting project will tell the semi-fictional story of four individuals, separated in space and time, who attempt to synchronise their inner and outer worlds, virtually and remotely. It asks whether, in a time of individualism, we can still learn to dream in common.

Developed and produced with the support of Arts Council England