Oona Doherty

Ecstatic celebration and horror, fact and fiction, grief and hope: Northern Irish choreographer Oona Doherty breaks new ground with Specky Clark. A series of theatrical images. For the first time, she is working with dialogues that she wrote together with the Irish playwright Enda Walsh. Named after and inspired by her great-grandfather, Specky Clark follows the life of a working-class Belfast boy who moves in with his two aunts at the age of ten to work in an abattoir. Oona Doherty, whose acclaimed play Navy Blue was already a guest at the Festspielhaus in the 2022/2023 season, combines her family story with contemporary dance and Irish folklore in a more personal way than ever before.
The biographical story of Doherty's great-grandfather initially unfolds in a theatrical performance characterized by themes such as family dynamics and class consciousness. Finally, this first, performative part of the piece culminates in an ecstatic dance celebration: eerie, wild and intense, the audience is taken on an emotional journey into the imagination of ten-year-old Specky Clark. Between the creepy atmosphere, disco music and masked figures, an energetic dance is created that combines Doherty's uncompromising movement language with movement quotes from the cult films Flashdance and Billy Elliot. The piece is musically accompanied by the Dublin Irish folk band Lankum, whose LP False Lankum was voted the best album of 2023 (The Guardian), and the atmospheric sounds of the Sardinian jazz saxophonist and tenor Gavino Murgia.

CREDITS

Oona Doherty choreography and artistic direction, Lisa Marie Barry direction, Enda Walsh dramaturgy, John Gunning lighting, Sabine Dargent stage, Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust costumes, Lankum, Gavino Murgia tenor, saxophone, Oona Doherty in collaboration with dancers dance