Kirkos (est. 2012) is an experimental new music group based in Dublin, Ireland. Strongly influenced by theatre, visual art, and performance art, we incorporate every part of the audience’s experience in our thinking when creating and performing our collectively-devised works. At the heart of our practice is engagement with place, sociopolitical issues, environment, and community.

Since forming in 2012, we have always treaded the line between experimental and contemporary classical music, giving over 200 premieres, encompassing most of Ireland’s leading composers. We are particularly proud to have given many Irish composers their first performances and commissions. We are also ensemble-in-residence in our venue of the same name!

 

Past highlights include:

  1. Beginner’s Guide to Slow Travel: A co-devised performance taking the environmental impact of touring and the possibilities of travelling differently as a starting point. Developed from Kirkos’ own slow travel journeys to venues in Huddersfield and beyond, the work explores notions of rest, energy, interspecies entanglement and collective grief, asking how music-making might adapt to a world facing climate crisis.

  2. To Every Action: An experimental performance at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, bringing together Fluxus works by Nam June Paik, improvisation, sonic curiosities and a floating violin. Part of the gallery’s First Thursday series, the event explored the intersections of experimental music, visual art and performance, transforming the gallery into a playful and sensory space. 

  3. Andy Warhol: Three Times Out: A series of performances at Hugh Lane Gallery responding to the landmark Andy Warhol exhibition. Including a collaboration with artists Day Magee and Robbie Blake, the performances explored Warhol’s artistic legacy and particularly his screen printing through various parallels in experimental music, sound and performance.

  4. For Private Use: an online magazine, a collection of about 40 pieces created by Kirkos and 8 commissioned composers, all designed to be performed by audience members on their own terms. Available to use here.

  5. Music for Cranes: a site-specific, collaboratively composed performance created for the Dublin Fringe Festival, using the motif of the crane as a starting point for a reflection on the Dublin being built for our generation right now.

  6. Biosphere: free, outdoor-based experimental encounters. Radical works exploring our relationship with dublin’s natural and built environment as we confront the climate crisis.

  7. The Irish premiere of Yannis Kyriakides’ immersive opera The Buffer Zone, a study on separation which divides the audience in two parts and offers each half a different perspective on the action, a kind of abstraction of the demilitarised zone in Cyprus and of borders everywhere.

  8. A 2019/20 series of low-key DIY concerts making use of a temporary working space to facilitate creative concert ideas from musicians who do not have access to established venues in Dublin. 

  9. Listening Bodies: a durational marathon co-production with the experimental choir Tonnta, taking over Smock Alley for five hours.

  10. Speaking of Music: a collaboration with guest-curator Andy Ingamells, loosely exploring experimental music and performance art that connects with text in innovative ways 

  11. Body Noise Work: a landmark series of residential interdisciplinary workshops led by Jennifer Walshe, followed by a Happening in Temple Bar Gallery.

  12. Fluxfest: an intermedia happening exploring the Fluxus movement, incorporating over 30 works, with props including black paint, gravel and naked bodies, immersing the audience in a ‘boundaryless environment of continuous art which would seamlessly overlap’.

  13. Blackout: highly theatrical concerts in almost complete darkness, comprising chamber masterpieces and new solo works written in response, matched with experimental food, funded by over 80 people through FundIt. 

  14. On the 100th anniversary of the Rite of Spring’s premiere, Kirkos unveiled a new version re-imagined for string trio and live electronic ballet, co-composed by fourteen Irish composers.




MEMBERS 

Robert Coleman (Harmonium / Melodica), Joan Somers Donnelly (Voice / Performer), Jane Hackett (Violin), Hannah Miller (Horn), Yseult Cooper Stockdale (Cello).


Composer and sound artist Robert Coleman explores place-based practices and human-nonhuman relationships, foregrounding listening as an ecological act. His outputs vary across a broad spectrum of concert work, installation, electroacoustic and spatial audio and in recent years he has produced a series of ecological soundwalks drawing on his field recording and long-term ecoacoustic approaches.

He completed a PhD in Sonic Arts at SARC, Queen’s University Belfast where he was supervised by an interdisciplinary team from Sonic Arts and Biological Sciences. He previously studied at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and has a background in architecture, which continues to inform his spatial and environmental approach to composition and sound art. 

In 2023, Robert founded the School of Wild Listening, a platform dedicated to ecological sound art and music and he is a founding member and performer with Dublin-based new music group Kirkos. He has been commissioned by Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Sound Scotland, Crash Ensemble and New Music Dublin, the National Concert Hall Dublin, Irish National Opera, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Tallaght Community Arts, violinist Larissa O’Grady and others.


Joan Somers Donnelly is a Dublin-based artist. Her practice is collaborative and moves between performance, visual art, writing and organising. Previous work includes a human choir that performed for cows; an interactive fantasy about the politics of housing in Dublin; a video essay about social spaces of gig economy workers; and performances and other invitations for lamp posts, zoom calls, U-bahn stations and apartments. She is primarily concerned with examining existing social structures and creating not-yet-existing ones, using performance and other live situations as a testing ground for experiments in different ways of relating. In 2023 she received an Arts Participation Bursary Award from the Arts Council, and in 2024 a Project Award, to realise when the world shifts, an improvisation-based co-creation project in collaboration with people living with brain injury and a multidisciplinary artistic team, in partnership with Headway Ireland. The workshops and performances took place in Kirkos.
Jane Hackett is an Irish violinist based between Dublin and Zurich, with a strong foundation in collaborative, multidimensional engagement between community and music access. Her qualifications in classical music performance has led to orchestral, chamber and solo playing throughout Ireland and internationally and later transitioned towards artform intersectional dissemination and creative sharing within her practice. Jane’s curiosity has led to many unusual pathways within her career including co-development of live violin creative audio description for Blind and Partially Sighted audiences with the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, educational multisensory music pathways for Deaf and Hard of Hearing children, creative inclusive tactile graphic notation and movement based work with Creative Ireland,  Cruinniú na nÓg and DLR Social Prescribing Network, as well as large scale funded experimental music concerts for and with Deaf audiences.Through her long term work with Kirkos, chamber collective Musici Ireland and circus ensemble, The Freestyle Orchestra, Jane has honed her understanding of collaborative improvisation, creative making and sound/body connection, and has toured sustainably to festivals including Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Sound Scotland, New Music Dublin and Musiquees Démesurées. In 2026, Jane curated and facilitated the Deaf Perspectives Symposium: Innovations in Multisensory Music Research, working alongside a Deaf team at Dublin City University. She was also awarded a Government of Ireland Scholarship to pursue a PhD at DCU from September 2026, investigating the aesthetic experience of classical contemporary music with and for Deaf audiences.
Horn player Hannah Miller grew up in Ireland, attained her Bachelor degree at Finland’s Sibelius Academy and graduated with a Master’s degree from New York’s Juilliard School, where she was awarded the William Schuman Prize for Music and Leadership. Hannah is currently Principal Horn with the Irish National Opera Orchestra and a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. She also performs with the RTE Concert Orchestra, Wexford Festival Opera and the Irish Baroque Orchestra. She is a former member of the Verbier Festival Orchestra in Switzerland and the Kuopio Symphony Orchestra in Finland.

As a member of the experimental Kirkos Ensemble since 2012, she regularly performs in festivals and concert series presenting a wide range of new and contemporary works, including collaborative compositions by the ensemble. Hannah’s dedication to new music also includes performances with Crash Ensemble, Le Concert Impromptu and Ulysses Ensemble in recent years.

Hannah is the Festival Director and founder of ‘FuddleFest’, a family-run music festival based on her family's farm in Fuddletown, Wexford which first took place in August 2020 and is preparing for it's 6th edition in 2026. She also works for the Old Irish Goat Society as a goatherd since 2025 for their conservation grazing programme, to target graze areas with high risk of wildfire as part of the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Council fire management strategy. 


  
Yseult Cooper Stockdale enjoys a particularly vibrant career, working extensively as a chamber musician and collaborator, orchestral cellist, and specialising in experimental and new music performance.

She has performed her own collaboratively-devised works internationally at festivals including New Music Dublin, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and London Contemporary Music Festival. Yseult has been a member of Kirkos Ensemble for over 10 years and has worked with groups including Ficino Ensemble, Crash, Musici Ireland, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, Ostravská Banda and The Vanbrugh. She is a founding member of the Ora String Quartet. As an orchestral player, she has sat Co-Principal with the Irish Chamber Orchestra and Principal with Irish National Opera, The Irish Studio Orchestra and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.


 












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