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 (Dumbworld) – arrives at Project Arts Centre, 15 and 16 October.
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.
Developed out of Carnival of Shadows: #1 Possible Human (KAF 2021), the work continues Dumbworld’s exploration of how the stories we tell reveal as much about ourselves as they do about history.
At once poetic and provocative, Where We Bury the Bones sings the unspoken stories buried in our soil.
