Oona Doherty

Sides of bacon and Halloween, grief and hope: the Northern Irish choreographer Oona Doherty goes in a new direction with Specky Clark. For the first time she will be working with dialogue, written herself together with the successful Irish author Enda Walsh. Named after and inspired by her great-grandfather, Specky Clark follows the surreal adventures of a working class boy from Belfast. Half-fact, half-fiction, the choreography tells a story about class consciousness, capitalism and family dynamics. The piece is accompanied by music from the Irish folk band Lankum, whose album False Lankum was named as Best Album of 2023 by The Guardian, and the atmospheric sounds of the Sardinian jazz saxophonist and tenor Gavino Murgia. Eerie, wild, intense and yet with plenty of humour, Doherty follows her acclaimed piece Navy Blue (seen at the Festspielhaus in 2022/2023) by taking a trip through the slaughterhouses that are part of her family history. More personally than ever before, she links her own family mythology to contemporary dance and Irish folklore. “I’ve never done anything like this,” Doherty says in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, “it could be a disaster.” Or a revelation.