May 23rd – 24th, 2025 Dublin Dance Festival, Dublin
90 minutes
Fantasy and Fear
Ireland marks a century of independence the ghosts of our history linger. Ireland is ever more concerned with development and progress, and this progress is ever more defined as built infrastructure. While the pandemic upended common expectations around where we work, live and interact, how the land is used retains its almost gravitational significance.
What right do we have to the land beneath our feet?
What would we do to keep it?
Parochialism, fear of the outsider and a deeply set desire to own, wander like shadows around a society grappling with modern questions of population, housing equality, opportunity and national identity. Inspired by the John B Keane’s seminal work The Field, Scorched Earth imagines a detective reopening a cold case, an unsolved crime twelve years after the fact. As stories are revisited and old wounds are opened The Detective and Suspect fall into a world of memory, fantasy, guilt and resentment.