Oona Doherty brings her Belfast ghost story to New York this Halloween

Oona Doherty is returning to New York with the strangest and most personal work of her career, a dance theater piece built around the boy her family still talks about. “Specky Clark” lands at Irish Arts Center in Hell’s Kitchen for a three-week run that opens the week of Halloween, which is exactly the night the show inhabits.

The piece follows Edward James Doherty, the choreographer’s great-great-grandfather, who was sent from Glasgow to Belfast at the age of ten after his mother died. In the city, he is taken in by the Clark sisters, who give him new clothes, a new name, and a job at the local abattoir. What follows slips between memory and invention, with a pig that comes back to life, a Halloween night when the dead walk, and a boy who discovers that dancing is the only thing that eases his grief. Doherty has described the work as a blend of fiction and biography, and the press materials call it a powerful and darkly funny narrative, lifting the veil on a Halloween night.

Generations of the Doherty family worked in abattoirs and butchers’ shops in Belfast, and the choreographer has folded that inheritance into the staging. The production is choreographed, written, and directed by Doherty in collaboration with her cast, with Faith Prendergast dancing the title role and Gerard Headley as the pig. The ensemble also includes Diarmuid Armstrong, Maëva Berthelot, Malick Cissé, Clay Koonar, Gennaro Lauro, Zoé Lecorgne, Erin O’Reilly and Joel Small. Music is by Maxime Jerry Fraisse and incorporates new and existing tracks from the contemporary Irish folk band Lankum, whose sound has done as much as anything in recent years to reintroduce American audiences to the darker edges of Irish tradition.

The work arrived to strong notice at home, where The Irish Times gave it four stars after its run at the Abbey Theatre during Dublin Dance Festival last year, and critic Michael Seaver wrote that the show was built on Doherty’s belief that words can lie but the body cannot. The Guardian called it a “bold, original distinctive work” with an “amazing sense of pure movement.”

New Yorkers already know Doherty’s work. Irish Arts Center presented “Hard to Be Soft, A Belfast Prayer” in 2022, which The New York Times named a Critic’s Pick and called “tenacious yet ethereal,” and the center was a presenting partner on “Navy Blue” at The Joyce in 2024.

“Specky Clark” anchors a season that Irish Arts Center is billing as its most ambitious yet, arriving five years after the opening of its building on 11th Avenue. Executive Director Aidan Connolly said the organization is “thrilled to launch our 2026-27 season featuring a bounty of world-class Irish artists across the disciplines,” adding that “this truly is our most spectacular season yet, and we are excited for New York to experience all of this wonderful work from so many artists at the absolute top of their game.”

Check out this interview with Oona Doherty on Sadler's Wells here: 

Tickets and full performance dates are available at irishartscenter.org.