A bone will never speak its secrets – but perhaps it can sing them.
After its premiere at Kilkenny Arts Festival (KAF), Where We Bury the Bones – the latest groundbreaking work from multi-award-winning duo John McIlduff and Brian Irvine (Olivier Award-nominated and four-time Ivor Novello winner) of Dumbworld – arrives at The Lyric Theatre, Belfast, for one night only.This intimate and challenging work of contemporary music theatre begins with the discovery of a single bone, unearthed during archaeological excavations in Kilkenny’s Abbey Quarter. From this fragment grows a sweeping reflection on civilisation: its rituals, its industries, its skateboarders – and the traces we leave behind.
On stage, audiences are invited into a living excavation. An 8-piece orchestra, opera, contemporary dance, live film, archival text, and a hand-built scale model intertwine to create a vivid, shifting landscape. By reassembling fragments of past and present, Where We Bury the Bones offers a startling meditation on who we are, how we live, and our relationship with the land beneath our feet.
At once poetic and provocative, Where We Bury the Bones sings the unspoken stories buried in our soil.
Where We Bury the Bones developed out of Carnival of Shadows: #1 Possible Human, a multi-sensory installation presented at KAF 2021. Combining music, voice, archive text, theatre, film and movement, this new work explores the way in which the stories we choose to tell often reveal more about ourselves than history itself.
The development of this work was supported by The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon, Creative Ireland and Kilkenny County Council, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council
