Events

A composer, singer and multi-instrumentalist, RÓIS blends elements of folk, sean nós, electronics and jazz harmony into a sound that transports listeners to a different realm. Released last year, her debut EP Mo Léan – featuring modern reinterpretations of ancient keening songs – met with instant acclaim, winning her Album of the Year at the Choice Music Prize and Best Emerging Artist at the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards. But it’s live that her unique vocal style, rooted in traditional sean nós singing while drawing comparisons with Björk, Meredith Monk and Hatis Noit, really comes into its own.

A group exhibition by 38 glass artists exploring the role of craft, & especially glass, has to play in creating a more connected world.

Peter Hanly had enjoyed a successful stage and screen career for 30 years when, during a dress rehearsal for Friel’s Molly Sweeney in 2011, he suddenly experienced stage fright. The crisis was so profound that within a year he’d given up acting altogether. Until now.

In What Are You Afraid Of? Hanly returns to the stage in this self-penned work exploring what happened to him and asking himself - and the audience - what are you afraid of? 

The Hubert Butler Annual Lecture was established in 2007 to honour the Kilkenny writer, historian and broadcaster whose remarkable consistency of vision and clarity of mind made him unique among essayists and whose work evinced an unsurpassed moral, political and literary integrity.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Perkin is no stranger to the Festival: his works featured in The Ros Tapestry Suite last year and Róisín Reimagined at KAF 2022. But this year he takes centre stage with a major new composition commissioned by the Festival.

The More Beautiful World is a striking setting of texts from an inspirational book by the American activist Charles Eisenstein, a work that asks what, in a time of social and ecological crisis, we can do to make the world a better place.

Common Threads brings together the intricate and expressive work of artists from Feltmakers Ireland and The Quilters Guild of Ireland. The exhibition is the 2025 edition of the Made Local GANS (Guilds, Associations, Networks and Societies) exhibition series which runs annually, showcasing the work of Design & Crafts Council Ireland (DCCI) organisational members, and the Made Local campaign which celebrates and promotes Irish-made design and craft.

beyond, beneath, Beside explores the context of the Tea Houses and their proximity to the River Nore. During her residency, artist Kate Fahey investigated the locale, including Talbot’s Inch model arts and crafts village, the former Greenvale Woolen Mills, and engaged with the rich subterranean, cultural and industrial history associated with the river. Positioning tactile encounters with the material world at the centre of this inquiry, the exhibition explores a sense of networked and interconnected resonances across time and space, situated beyond, beneath and beside the riverbank.

Jonah McGreevy, co-creative director and producer of Loosysmokes – the award-winning modern circus company that’s thrilled Festival audiences in recent years – joins forces with two of Portugal’s leading performers, Daniel Seabra and Mafalda Gonçalves, to present this explosive acrobatic spectacle exploring the troubling times we’re living through.

Featuring works from KCAT Studio artists past and present, The Known and Unknown World celebrates the 25th anniversary of KCAT Studio. Juxtaposing local landmarks with fantastical landscapes, common songbirds with speculatively designed creatures, human portraits with extra-planetary beings, The Known and Unknown World invites the viewer to discover and celebrate the multiplicity of ways in which the world can be experienced, understood and recorded.

In music, ‘a piacere’ means ‘at the performer’s discretion’. It’s an instruction for the performer to interpret a passage as freely as they like, and Fahmi Alqhai has taken the idea to heart. Since completing his studies in Switzerland and Spain, Alqhai has established himself as one of the most brilliant viola da gamba players in the world, celebrated for his highly personal take on the repertoire.

Francesco Turrisi connects with Congolese guitar virtuoso Niwel Tsumbu for a very special concert that explores their shared influences and passions, from Brazilian acoustic music to flamenco via the Mediterranean and central Africa.

Kate Ellis & Francesco Turrisi Residency- Two outstanding musical adventurers join forces this year to curate this exciting residency project that sees them collaborate with special guests on a series of one-off concerts

When the wild geese fly south and the leaves fall from the trees, the bear knows that now is the time to go into the den. And that’s exactly what he does, year after year. But then one winter people come to the forest…

Programme II
Featuring works by:
Gaspar Sanz
Tobias Hume
Marin Marais
Johann Sebastian Bach
Heinrich von Biber

Blue Haze of Deep Time is an immersive sound installation by composer Jonathan Nangle. Featuring recorded audio alongside graphic design/video by Stephen MacDevitt and audio sculptures by Rory Tangney, the installation invites the listener to experience the colours, rhythms and textures of the sea.

Over a career spanning more than 50 years, Paul Muldoon has never shied away from history, confronting some of the most important moments in Ireland’s past. Following the premiere of Custom of the Coast, his collaboration with Kamala Sankaram exploring the lives of Savita Halappanavar and the 18th-century pirate Anne Bonny, the current Ireland Professor of Poetry offers a brief survey of Irish history from earliest times to the present day through the prism of his own work. This illustrated lecture features poems by Muldoon on the Vikings, the Normans, the English and the Troubles, as well as more recent events.

Back in 2012 alt-folk visionary Seamus Fogarty’s first album, God Damn You Mountain, took traditional folk, country and blues and twisted it into wonderful new shapes, deploying a dizzying array of sounds including drones, field recordings, twanging banjos and cascading strings. For this special gig, Fogarty revisits his groundbreaking debut while introducing songs from his newest work.

Contemplating his mortality in 2017, Ryuichi Sakamoto said he wanted to make ‘music I won’t be ashamed to leave behind’. By any measure, he already had. From the groundbreaking electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra to his solo career composing acclaimed scores for films like The Last Emperor and The Revenant, Sakamoto left an extraordinary legacy in both popular and experimental music.

To celebrate Sakamoto’s achievements, one of Ireland’s leading pianists, Ruth McGinley, joins composer and musician Matthew Nolan to perform a selection of the great composer’s works.

Viola player Joanna Mattrey is a musician who continually expands the sonic terrain of her instrument. She opens this concert with a mix of commissioned and original pieces for solo viola, including the Irish premieres of ‘A Fleeting Once’ by Nick Dunston and her own composition, ‘Beholden’, before being joined by Ellis, Turrisi and Colin Dunne, the extraordinary dance artist who has been redefining Irish dance for years, for a special collaboration that blurs the boundaries between sound and movement, tradition and improvisation.

For this special event, Valerie Mulvin hosts a panel discussion that brings together leading thinkers on the built and creative environment to explore the city as a space we shape imaginatively and figuratively, which then shapes us, and to ask how we might reinvent and recalibrate that space as cities continue to expand.

Featuring guest speakers Dr Mark Dorrian, Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh; Michael Higgins, Kilkenny-based filmmaker and co-curator of Cities as Character; and more, Productive Disorder: Cities and Imagination explores one of the most urgent questions of our time.

Singer-songwriter Elise is the latest standout homegrown artist to feature in the Rollercoaster Sessions. Since releasing her debut EP in 2019 Elise has built a loyal following attracted by her evocative lyrics, soulful voice and fresh blend of indie, folk and pop. Her new EP I’ve Been Here is a deeply introspective record that explores love, loss and finding light in dark times.

The Marble City Sessions has created more than its fair share of groundbreaking collaborations and none more fruitful than that of Aoife Ní Bhriain and Cormac McCarthy. The duo first played together at the Festival in 2022, and now their instant musical rapport has led to an album, Cosán Casta.

Both grew up playing Irish music while also studying classical music, and while Ní Bhriain has emerged as a leading exponent of Bach’s solo violin repertoire, McCarthy turned to jazz, building a career as a pianist, composer and arranger.

Strung are a contemporary Irish music ensemble based in Cork whose highly original sound emerges from a unique combination of violin, cello and piano, melding classical and traditional melodies in new and exciting ways.

Violinist Rakhi Singh is shaped by musical curiosity and collaboration, from chamber ensembles to genre-crossing projects. As co-founder of Manchester Collective, Rakhi thrives on breaking down musical boundaries.