Pioneering company returns with whodunnit dance theatre

It's the story of an unsolved murder that starts in an interrogation room, a dance between detective and suspect.

Scorched Earth is the latest production from Luke Murphy's Attic Projects, the Irish dance/theatre outfit touring to Australia a second time as part of the 2026 Brisbane Festival in September.

Since its last visit with Volcano in 2024, the company has rapidly built an international reputation for groundbreaking shows.

Scorched Earth is a cold case whodunnit that combines dance, theatre and cinema, and its last run was in New York City.

"Hopefully you can have this world where you can break the rules and put the audience in a place where they don't totally know what they're watching," Murphy told AAP.

At its core, the show is a meditation on land - and the lengths we will go to keep hold of it - that Murphy sees as a particularly Irish tale.

It's inspired by a seminal work of Irish theatre from the 1960s, John B. Keane's The Field.

Audiences down under likely won't be familiar with it, yet Australia's own troubled history of land ownership provides a whole different context.

"The extremes that people will go to when they feel something should be theirs has got a pretty international relevance at the moment," said Murphy, who directs, choreographs and also performs in Scorched Earth.

The legal concept of terra nullius (land belonging to no-one) that was used to justify British colonisation in Australia was overturned by the High Court in the Mabo case in 1992.

Present at a welcome to Country ceremony on his last visit to Australia, Murphy was deeply affected to see Indigenous people's relationship to the land going back 65,000 years.

"To be talking to people who can actually trace themselves back to that time, and hold those stories and that relationship to land, I just found it so profound," he said.

The production has been in development on and off since 2019, with the notion that both story and the choreography should be fully developed.

"I give myself a lot of time to make the work, so that I can try and hold both those things to a standard that I'm happy with," Murphy said.