DINAH MULLEN AND MICHELLE MCMAHON
This page contains details of our joint and individual work. Please Scroll down for Creative Team and Partner Biographies.
Made in response to the location and inspired by those Dinah and Michelle met in Postman’s Park, it blends original composition, binaural sound design, poetic imagery, and the enigmatic prophecy of a raven.
This feathered fiction is a solo audio experience, with a digital guide. It lasts 20 min and is accessible through headphones and a smartphone.
Michelle McMahon WRITING AND NARRATION
Dinah Mullen SOUND DESIGN AND COMPOSITION
Maz Hemming DIGITAL PROGRAMMING
Rosie Johnson Illustrates ILLUSTRATION
PRODUCED FOR. THE GOLDEN KEY BY CONEY - a large scale, free immersive takeover of the City of London.
“The Golden Key was a delight to be part of and an extraordinary animation of key areas of the City. Coney worked hard to engage residents in the process and people were very keen to share their hopes, dreams and imaginations for the event and make new connections ”
— City of London resident on The Golden Key
MICHELLE MCMAHON
Michelle McMahon is an Irish artist with 15 years of experience working in the UK, Ireland and internationally as an actor, writer and director. She has played a wide variety of roles in theatre, film, interactive games and radio drama. She loves creating transportive worlds that are exciting and entertaining for audiences to play in and has made work with BAFTA-winning theatre makers Coney and Punchdrunk and written and directed new worlds for Secret Cinema. From intimate solo audio experiences to large scale fantastical productions for thousands, her work oftenfeatures immersive worlds and interactive elements.
sELECTED PROJECTS
Co-Writer and Creative Associate Director: WISHMAS
Secret Cinema 2023-2024
A magical and hopeful new Christmas fable for family audiences. We transformed The Vaults London into Wishmas from November 2023 - January 2024 - a playground for the world’s wishes, packed full of enchanted charm and heart. As script writer of the experience and Creative Associate Director, I developed the story, tone, lore and magical world-building with an incredible multi-disciplinary team of animators, set and production designers, lighting designers, game designers and composers, setting creative scope and managing multiple creative deliveries within project timelines. The experience attracted audiences of up to 3000 people per day.
Writer & Writing Mentor: ROUTES
The Egg, Theatre Royal Bath, 2021
A digital thriller set in a world where environmental crime is rife, alliances are shifting, and making enemies is a dangerous game. A multi-strand digital narrative experience, this was a unique collaboration between artists, technologists, and young people. The scope of script writing spanned research, gameplay and narrative design and nuanced world building - from poetry to police interviews, news broadcasts and political speeches, and an entire cast of civil servants brought to life through emails, instant messages and voice notes. Throughout the development stages, I collaborated with a team of young writers (approx.14-25 years old), in a series of playful digital storytelling workshops I designed, to nurture their talent and support their ideas around world building, character creation and plot story lines.
Dinah Mullen
Dinah Mullen is a performance sound designer with 20 years of experience & more than 200 national & international production credits. She has significant experience within dance theatre, theatre/dance for young audiences, audio drama / interactive audio, devising and community engagement contexts.
Dinah designs for intimate performances; The Last Taboo of Motherhood (Installation, Fuel), The Soothing Presence of Strangers (BBC Radio 3 Between the ears, Rhiannon Armstrong), The Ministry of Time Travel (Interactive audio, The National Archives/Coney)
Work for theatre spaces; The Plague (Arcola Theatre, Dir Neil Bartlett), Roller (Barbican Pit, Marstarrab, The Bolds (Unicorn Theatre, Dir Lee Lyford).
Utilising the power of sound as a transportive tool, Dinah creates immersive environments and experiences; Squirrel (The Egg/Unicorn Dir Tim Bell), The Sticky Dance (Southbank Centre/Brighton Festival/ The Place/ Tanshaus nrw, 2nd Hand Dance), With Fire and Rage (EuroFestival Liverpool, Artists on the Frontline/Parade fest), Just Passing Through (City of London, Coney).
Employing sound/music as a tool to guide and intervene in the emotional state of a listener, Dinah facilitates both quietly moving and powerful reactions in audiences; FORGE (Installation, Rachel Mars, Transform Festival/Horizon Showcase Edinburgh/Barbican Pit/UNIT 15 for MAYK, Chutzpah Festival Vancouver), The You Play 1 & 2 (Audio Plays, Dir Jessica Lazar), Stella (Brighton Theatre Royal/Hoxton
Hall for LIFT/Brakke Grond for Holland Festival).
sELECTED PROJECTS
Sound Designer and Composer: With Fire and Rage
EuroFestival Liverpool, 2023
The specially commissioned audio tour shared stories from artists on the frontline in Ukraine with visitors to Liverpool during the city’s Eurovision festivities. Created by renowned Ukrainian producer and cultural activist Veronika Skliarova and British director and writer Zoe Lafferty, With Fire and Rage features some of Ukraine’s most radical and innovative artists. Combining testimony with photography, 360 images, visual art, poetry and music, each of the stories focuses on a different artist in Ukraine. Winner of the Stage Digital Project of the Year Award 2024.
Sound Designer, Composer and Performer: Forge
Rachel Mars, 2018 - Present
A powerful durational installation with on-stage metal work exploring who memorials are for and what happens to places where traumatic events take place.
In 2014 the 100kg iron 'welcome' gate was stolen from Dachau concentration camp. A local blacksmith forged a replica. It was exactly like the original. Almost.
Over four days artist Rachel Mars invites you to bear witness as she welds together another copy of the gate. This impactful performance installation asks questions about memorials and tackles what it is to preserve a site of collective trauma.
Sound Designer Dinah Mullen creates a live soundtrack, orchestrating an atmospheric sound-world that includes previously recorded metal work, bespoke compositions and a library of Memorial Silences.
Performed at Transform Festival Leeds, Horizon Showcase Edinburgh, for MAYK at Unit 15 Bristol, Barbican, Chutzpah Festival Vancouver.