Luke Murphy and Sarah Dowling in Scorched Earth. Photo: Teddy Wolff

In his director’s note for Scorched Earth–a new piece at St. Ann’s Warehouse presented by the Irish company Attic Projects–Luke Murphy (who also wrote the piece, choreographed it, and performs in it) credits the sources and works that have shaped the piece: a 1960s play by Irish writer John Keane; a true crime book about a 1980s bank-robbery-turned-murder in Dublin; a history of agrarian conflict in Ireland; and a documentary film about American real estate developer/convicted murderer Robert Durst. So its elements are well-worn, well-known: violence, property, and the intersection of the two. It’s about a years-old murder case that remained unsolved for lack of trying, not for lack of evidence: an open secret in a small town. And yet It’s hard to write about in a spoiler-free way, because theatrically, the wonder of its ending outstrips everything that comes before. (Spoiler alert, in other words.)

An unsettled, uneasy pairing of a rural crime story (whose mystery, as noted, lies more in the puzzling desultoriness of the original investigation than in a whodunnit) and an atmospheric ensemble dance piece, Luke Murphy’s creation plays out the threads of love, violence, and history that bind a community to its land and its people–and that bind the people to the community. “Being from a place and of a place are two different things,” says the local police sergeant to the detective looking over a cold case that occurred in his small town. When Scorched Earth strikes the balance correctly, it’s stunning, using movement to illuminate hidden truths in the narrative and the narrative to anchor the movement. But when it skips out of gear, both movement and story can get bogged down in the dry and literal. 

A five-person ensemble, including Murphy, serves as both dance troupe and actors in the crime tale. Tasked with a review of “land crimes” in rural Ireland, cold case Detective Alison Kerr (Sarah Dowling) revisits a decade-old death that was deemed an accident at the time. A property developer, William Dean (Will Thompson) had recently arrived in the community where his grandmother lived, trading on his roots in the area to secure planning permission for his project. Shortly after purchasing a hilly plot at auction, he’s found dead in it. John McKay (Murphy), the tenant farmer who’d been leasing the property—and was the losing bidder—was lightly questioned at the time, but no charges were brought. Now, Kerr comes quickly to the conclusion that there’s no need to look further. So far, so cut and dry, and most of this plot takes place either in an interrogation room (Alyson Cummins’s set is suitably bleak and gray) or in conversation between Kerr and the local sergeant (Ryan O’Neil), bolstered by a recurring slide show of documents and images that can get a little repetitive and murky. 

What’s being teased out here is a sense of the community’s priorities: The town knew perfectly well what probably happened, but they have their own priorities. Dean played up being “from” the area when it was “useful for business,” McKay is of the land, and it’s at the juncture where “property” and “landscape” intersect that Scorched Earth works best: when that paper idea of ownership gives way to a deep physical connection to place. It’s McKay who worked the land, whose sweat and blood are worked into it. This point is hammered home a little too often in the narrative, from Kerr’s repeated questioning of both McKay and the sergeant, and through snippets of an interview with Dean. But it’s in Murphy’s choreography where we see that idea come to life: the physicality of violence, of earth, of the body as living entity and dead weight.

There’s an uncanny strangeness in the best of the dance pieces: One side of a fight that ends in death. A man being embraced, almost absorbed by a moving, constantly reshaping embodied mound of grass (the dancer is Tyler Carney-Faleatua, and the remarkable grass suit is designed by Alyson Cummins and built by Valentina Gambardella). A community line dance that’s as fine-grained a social ritual as any Bridgerton ball. True, there are moments where Murphy’s movement vocabulary leans too far into the literal: for example, the ensemble forming a weaving human chain, set to a cover of the Fleetwood Mac song “The Chain.” But when the grass starts to move, when the human is enfolded by a moving heap of soil, it’s visceral and visual.  

Luke Murphy and Tyler Carney-Faleatua in Scorched Earth. Photo: Teddy Wolff

Toward the end of the piece, the ensemble slowly begins to take apart the physical structure that comprises the set, revealing the nature beneath: a field angling up into a steep hill. The drabness of institutional surroundings gives way to a sweeping three-dimensional landscape, at which the ensemble flings itself with an abandon that borders on–and then crosses into–violence. The addition of the vertical dimension frees and transforms the energy of the entire thing: it’s brutal and exhausting and beautiful all at once. Scorched Earth has its slow spots, but the visual and physical poetry of its ending ensures that the last impression is breathtaking.