Drop Everything: how a tiny arts festival parties for Ireland (2024)

Since 2012, a gathering has taken place on Inis Oírr, the smallest of the Aran Islands, called Drop Everything. It’s an extraordinary event: cutting-edge contemporary work across performance, music, sound and visual art, food, incredibly fun DJ sets, and an engagement with the local people and landscape that generates a unique atmosphere and legacy.

Artists who have participated since 2012 include John Gerrard, Manchán Magan, Sóley Stefánsdóttir, the Tweed Project, Rich Gilligan, Molly Nilsson, Zebra Katz, Maria Lax, Lisa Hannigan, Saint Sister, Eimear Walshe, John Francis Flynn, Robyn Lynch and many, many more.

From food (in 2022, Cúán Greene of Ómós cooked over fire on the beach for attendees, making a seafood boil of brown crab, mussels, clams, langoustine, potato and corn for about 180 people), to merchandise (a collaboration with the Berlin label Starstyling), Drop Everything has managed, somehow, to shrug off the pressures and expectations of contemporary festivals – if one can even frame it as such – and evolve with its own sense of itself, contracting and expanding depending on context, or perhaps even mood. An early slogan of the event was, after all, “everything is subject to change”.

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Last weekend, a smaller iteration than usual took place. On the first evening, the programme was given over to the sunset, with a temporary beach hut doubling as a margarita bar built on the rocks. Saturday began with stints in the sea and sauna (built for a previous outing of the event), followed by yoga, and a reading hour at Drop Everything’s library. FAED (Gemma Dunleavy, and Róisín Berkley on harp) performed in the local church, freshly decorated for a Confirmation ceremony, with both artists finding their way in and out of newly composed, delicate tunes. Later, Sorcha Richardson performed on the windowsill of Teach an Tae, following a meal created by the Cicchetti Snack Bar of arancini and crab claws.

On Sunday, the central venue was the local handball alley, hosting a remarkable DJ set from Alan Schaffer, and an audiovisual performance by Pauric Freeman, featuring a compelling merge of musical rhythms and beats with minimalist yet hugely rich visuals.

The driving force behind Drop Everything is Galwegian Mary Nally, who divides her time between Inis Oírr and New York City. The scaled-down size of this year’s gathering was due to so much energy being expended at the Venice Biennale contemporary art exhibition. Drop Everything previously commissioned Eimear Walshe’s 2022 film, Land Cruiser. This year, Walshe represented Ireland at Venice. When it came time to hire someone to produce Ireland’s party at the prestigious global art event, Walshe tapped Drop Everything.

“I feel like they represent a contemporary Ireland that I want to see exist,” Nally said about Walshe over email in the days following last week’s gathering, “and I wanted to host an event that, firstly, supported them, and secondly I wanted Ireland to punch way above its weight on the Biennale party circuit. Other countries put big budgets behind these events, but Ireland maybe doesn’t quite have the same approach. Personally I think there’s a fear around the idea of a ‘party’, as opposed to recognising a party as a unique space for networking and instigating collaboration. Most of the people I work with today I met at a party or a club.”

In achieving that event, Nally credits the “incredible crew”, and also their collaborator, Iceland at Venice, represented by Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir. The event was also in solidarity with Palestine, through the arts centre Dar Jacir and the Artists + Allies x Hebron show at Venice. Hosted in an old shipyard, the party featured performances from Irish harpist Roisín Berkeley, Icelandic musician Mr Silla, Kurdish-Syrian musician Mohammad Syfkhan, and DJ sets from Björk, Byron Yeates and DJ Rupture.

In 2018, Drop Everything launched a creative education programme – Do Anything – with local schools. Students from Inis Oírr have since performed at London Fashion Week for the designer Robyn Lynch, and Drop Everything has collaborated with the skateboarder and builder Phili Halton of Goblin Magazine to build a skate ramp on the island. Transition-year students have also written and recorded with the musicians Sorcha Richardson and Morgana.

This initiative, Nally says, is born from a feeling that “creative subjects in schools are still very much under the umbrellas of just art, music or technical drawing”. Nally wanted to demonstrate to students that there are a range of professions within the broader creative industries: publishing, lighting design, producing, motion graphics, art direction and so on. “The principal of Coláiste Ghobnait, Bríd Ní Dhonnacha, has been so open to the programme from the beginning,” Nally says. “Essentially, she lets us completely rewrite the curriculum for a week, so we’re very lucky to be working with a school that sees the value in something like this.”

Nally also doesn’t view Drop Everything as a “festival”. “I almost feel like we’re a temporary village,” she says, “with a diverse community of artists, builders, cooks and teachers ... We can commission an artist, build a library or a skatepark, and produce a school show all at once. Drop Everything’s value system is the same today as it was on day one. It is built on generosity and respect. Respect for the community of the island, the community we create, the environment surrounding us, and the creatures we share space with.”

Nally’s immediate plans involve creating a template of the education programme that could be adopted by other communities. More than a decade into Drop Everything, Nally says what she’s most proud of is the feedback from parents regarding the positive impact of the education programme on young people, “particularly around confidence and breaking through shyness”. Many collaborations and creative projects have also emerged from people meeting at Drop Everything. Nally says: “I get a lot of people telling me that the weekender helped them make big life decisions, or it marked the end of a tough time for them ... hearing that in some small way Drop Everything gave people a break, or support that they needed at a certain time, kind of reassures me that having this very elaborate hobby maybe has some value.”