Pictures: Neon Dusk a big hit as Kilkenny Arts Festival opens to great acclaim

If you haven't already, go and see Neon Dusk. It is a truly exceptional blend of acrobatics and contemporary circus from Jonah McGreevy, Mafalda Conclaves and Daniel Seabra.

Powered by solar energy, it has audiences absolutely enthralled, and feeling a sense of anxiety for these incredible performers. It runs in the Castle Yard until August 17.

Kilkenny Arts Festival got under way last Thursday at a busy launch event at Butler House and Garden. Photographer Vicky Comerford got some great pictures.

“It’s always a thrill at the brink of another Kilkenny Arts Festival with a real buzz building across the city,” said festival director Olga Barry. “We’re particularly excited right now as there’s so much new work being premiered at the festival this year, where audiences at Kilkenny will the very first to experience extraordinary new work — where artists across a wide range of disciplines from circus to music, from opera to digital mixed reality, will show their work to audiences for that unmissable first time.”
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HIGHLIGHTS
With many events having taken place, some of the highlights still to come include:
The premiere of Peter Hanly’s What Are you Afraid Of? with the festival’s most frequent theatre partners of recent years, Rough Magic.

Directed by the award-winning Lynne Parker and featuring Hanly himself playing the main role in this extraordinary work of self-interrogation. This production simultaneously takes us into Hanly’s inner thoughts while inviting us all to consider the same primary question of ourselves. Presented in partnership with Rough Magic at Watergate Theatre.

There’s also the premiere of a new audio/visual projection spectacle from the genre-defying artist Laura Sheeran for Light Up the Castle 2025 – ___ Because You’re Free for Kilkenny Castle.

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. Commissioned by Kilkenny Arts Festival and presented in association with OPW. The free event runs August 13-16 at Kilkenny Castle.

Another premiere to come this week is Where We Bury the Bones from the powerhouse of Dumbworld, John McIlduff and Brian Irvine, with designer Sabine Dargent. Developed out of a work presented at KAF 2021, this new production begins with the discovery of a single bone during an excavation which explores the way in which we choose to tell can reveal more about ourselves than the history itself.  It takes place at Watergate Theatre from August 14.

There is also plenty of music still to come, with the likes of the Irish Chamber Orchestra set to appear at St Canice’s Cathedral.

The ever-popular free, twice daily pop-up concert series, Secret Garden Music is featured throughout the festival across the fabric of Kilkenny City and environs.

For full programme and booking online, visit kilkennyarts.ie or by phone 056-7752175 / in person at the Festival Box Office 76 John Street, Kilkenny.