Guest columnist: Brian Irvine from Dumbworld on new project How We Stand...How We Breathe
2nd December, 2025
Brian Irvine, Composer, Professor of Music at Ulster University and Co-Artistic Director of Dumbworld reflects on the artistic process behind How We Stand...How We Breathe, seven musical interventions for orchestra, soloists, improvisers, rappers, choirs and poets from Northern Ireland.
When writer/director John McIlduff and I set up Dumbworld all those years ago, it was with a shared belief that great and captivating art is made by often unique combinations of forms and people. People from all dimensions of society, across broad knowledge spectrums, ages and experiences. We believe passionately in a unique and beguiling Northern Ireland and that the greatest art lies in the “in-between”...in the cracks between the places or categories… in the familiar and in the abstract. For us, taxonomic barriers exist only to be pulled apart.
Our mission has always been to engage, create, collaborate and collectively disrupt, illuminate, celebrate and challenge all aspects of life and in as many ways as possible. So, in the creation of How We Stand...How We Breathe we reached out to hundreds of individuals and micro-communities across Northern Ireland to explore what it is to live, breathe, work and love here.
Over 18 months John and I worked with a wonderful team of facilitators from Dumbworld to connect and create work supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. We worked with teenagers, rappers, poets, LGBTQ choirs, care providers, improvisers, sean-nós singers, immigrant families from Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Nigeria, children with special educational needs, free improvisers, farmers, doctors, singers, writers and artists from all corners of Northern Ireland. We formed strong bonds and friendships and created new models for collaborative making, writing, composing, inventing, singing and playing.
We wanted to make a challenging, rugged body of work. Work that wrestled with definitions of culture, identity, age, race, care, ritual and gender. Work that redefined common spaces as places for engagement and created new opportunities to stand at the epicentre of the visceral, sonic landscape that is orchestral music.
For many years I have enjoyed a hugely creative working relationship with the Ulster Orchestra on many wild and ambitious orchestral adventures. On this project, Patrick McCarthy and all the team at Ulster Orchestra were just wonderful - embracing fully, with consistent good cheer, all the shifts and unexpected challenges that come with the territory. We spent three wonderful days recording at the orchestra’s home in Townsend Street, and it was utterly delightful to feel the equal sense of excitement, adventure and joyfulness in both participants and orchestral players.
We are all so incredibly proud of this project, how it stands as a contemporary portrait of Northern Ireland and the way in which it proposes an alternative understanding of difference, tolerance, equality and care.
Of course at its core is the heart, love and concerns of the people who gave their all to help create it and participate in it – to the hundreds of intergenerational participants, performers, technicians, facilitators, sound designers, mix engineers, musicians, video editors, cameramen, writers, poets, singers, rappers, dancers, vocal coaches, conductors, society and community group leaders, repetiteurs, teachers, assistants, students, bus drivers, food makers and families we thank you all.
“Art is the only possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world” Joseph Beuys