Kilkenny Arts Festival Director Olga Barry introduces this year's KAF programme, which brings arts happenings of every imaginable shape and size to the Marble City from August 7th - 17th.
The season of summer arts festivals is upon us, it's a thrilling part of the annual Irish festival calendar.
Festivals have a way of changing the air, they take over a city and ideally create a renewed openness to new ideas where we step out of ourselves and allow us to be moved, immersed and inspired.
New work defines Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2025 with a range of provocative themes, and we’re excited to welcome audiences to witness these artists’ work for the first time.
Amongst them are:
-Rough Magic’s production of Peter Hanly’s What Are you Afraid Of? is an extraordinary work of self-interrogation that invites us in to Hanly’s most vulnerable inner thoughts while enticing us, the audience, to consider the same primary question of ourselves – under Lynne Parker’s direction, this exceptionally funny play gets to central part of how we all experience our place in the world.
-Custom of the Coast is a dramatic new work framing the stories of two women who changed Ireland – Savita Halappanavar and Anne Bonny – from US/Indian composer Kamala Sankaram, with text from poet Paul Muldoon.
A festival favourite is site-specific new work commissioned for Kilkenny Castle; this year brings a new projection spectacle from the genre-defying artist Laura Sheeran titled, ____ Because You’re Free. Sheeran’s work asks what it means to be human today, in a world gripped by technological advancement, in an ecological crisis, and invites us to remember ourselves as feeling, embodied beings in this nighttime shared experience.
We're thrilled to be back at the Castle Yard for Neon Dusk, a new work featuring an acrobatic blend of spectacle, movement and contemporary circus from Jonah McGreevy, Mafalda Conclaves and Daniel Seabra. Powered by solar energy, this new show is a surreal and highly original take on human movement, bathed in the fractured light of our electric age.
We also premiere Where We Bury the Bones from the powerhouse of Dumbworld, John McIlduff and Brian Irvine, with designer Sabine Dargent. This new production begins with the discovery of a single bone during an excavation in Kilkenny, which explores the way in which we choose to tell can reveal more about ourselves than the history itself.
In music, we welcome some of the island’s exceptional ensembles with Irish Chamber Orchestra and Henning Kraggerud, Peter Whelan’s Irish Baroque Orchestra, Chamber Choir Ireland celebrating Arvo Pärt at 90, and a range of lunchtime concerts. The Black Abbey is renowned for its acoustics, and we’re thrilled to have the Irish Premiere of Bill Barclay’s production Secret Byrd featuring the Gesualdo Six and the viol consort Fretwork in an immersive piece of concert theatre.
Residencies aboud in Kilkenny, and this year we have the incomparable Martin Hayes and his ever-rewarding Marble City Sessions, and Kate Ellis and Francesco Turrisi undertaking a shared residency exploring a massive range of music, with special invited guests across 8 events.
Amongst the events curated by Kate is the Irish Premiere of 740 Years of Reverb from composer Jonny Greenwood and performed by organists Eliza McCarthy and James McVinnie – titled uniquely for St. Canice’s Cathedral, this work is performed over a continuous 8 hours, where audiences will experience a deeply moving expanse of sound. With lunchtime concerts across the festival along with standout new voices like RÓIS and Meltybrains?, music remains as intriguing and plentiful in Kilkenny as ever.
Butler Gallery presents the mesmerising works of Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leech in Cities of the World and there’s a plethora of poetry readings of new work and conversations, installations and premieres embedded across the festival as well as twice daily 'secret’ performances throughout the 10 days in the Marble City.
Come join us in this special kinship between artist and audience this August.
Kilkenny Arts Festival runs from August 7th - 17th - find out more here
