Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Choreographer Oona Doherty, who was this year named an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells, is best known for her raw dance works rooted in narratives from her hometown of Belfast. Her latest show, Specky Clark, which premiered at Pavillon Noir in Aix-en-Provence on Saturday, is no exception. Blending fact and fiction, it is named after her great-great-grandfather, who moved from Glasgow to Northern Ireland and worked in an abattoir.Specky Clark is structured more like a piece of theatre than a contemporary dance work. Over its 60-minute duration, a thick Northern Irish-accented voiceover, rich with colloquialisms, provides characters’ voices as the titular “Specky” (portrayed by female dancer Faith Prendergast — gender swapping is a recurring motif for Doherty) embarks on a surreal, darkly comic journey.On the night of Samhain, or Celtic Halloween, when the veil between the realms of the living and dead is thinnest, a pig that Specky shot at the abattoir comes back to life. Dancer Gerard Headley, who portrays the pig, suddenly emerges from a fabric cocoon hung from the ceiling like a carcass, spouting pithy bacon-related wordplay.Together, the human-swine duo search for portals between worlds where they will be able to reconnect with loved ones they’ve lost. Their endeavour culminates in a large group of performers dressed in pagan-style costumes — a pair of twisted horns here, a straw headdress there — coming together in a bizarre ceremony, weaving around each other in ritualistic circles to a stripped-back cover of The Specials’ “Ghost Town”. (Until this point the score has mostly consisted of melancholic folk music by the Irish group Lankum.)Overt theatricality is new for Doherty, but working with text isn’t: her breakthrough solo performance Hope Hunt and the Ascension Into Lazarus, for example, saw her shouting phrases whose rhythm her body deftly echoed. Yet in Specky Clark, instead of translating the recorded voiceover into a visceral movement language, Doherty’s cast of nine dancers often mimic it with naturalistic gestures — an approach that feels less intricate and impactful than her earlier work.There are more stylised sections, however, with Clay Kooner and Gennaro Lauro’s performances as Specky’s adopted Irish mammies standing out. The two men play the women with exaggerated physicality — rolling shoulders, flourishing hands, and juddering their heads in sync with overlapping tuts, and exclamations of “jaysus” and “God love ’im”. What Doherty wants us to take from all this is unclear. Themes of grief, identity and familial inheritance emerge — a scene in which Specky experiments with popular dance moves from TikTok, everything from flossing to jumpstyle kicks, seemingly mirrors Doherty’s own route into dance — yet struggle to find wider relevance beyond Specky Clark’s idiosyncratic setting. It’s exciting to watch Doherty take creative risks, figuring out how to find the universal within the particular. She almost gets there at the end of the show, closing on a scene of Specky contracting inwards as he lies prostrate on the floor. Soon, though, a light flicks on. “I don’t even want to know what you were up to, Clark,” the voiceover intones. I wonder what more would emerge if Doherty left the lights off a little longer.★★★☆☆Tour continues in 2025, with performances at Sadler’s Wells, London, May 9 and 10
