As part of Irish Design Week 2025, composer Alastair White is set to take on the unique task of adapting James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” into opera through a week-long open studio residency at the Thomas MacDonagh Museum in Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary, from Nov. 17–23, 2025.

The project is presented in partnership with Design & Crafts Council Ireland and will allow audiences the opportunity to experience opera in development.

“The project contends that — like the sparse prose of ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ — ‘Finnegans Wake’ has been ill-used by approaches that attempt to ‘decode’ it through what is absent: in ignorance of the sheer joy that the language embodies. There is no iceberg, no skeleton key; ‘Finnegans Wake’ is not a cipher. It is only itself,” said White per an official press release.

The open studio runs daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Nov. 17, 2025).

The residency, titled “Designing Finnegans Wake,” marks the beginning of FINNEGANS WAKE 100, a multi-year artistic initiative leading to the centenary of Joyce’s 1939 masterpiece.

White’s notable projects include the fashion-opera cycle “WEAR,” “ROBE,” “WOAD,” and “RUNE,” and “#CAPITAL,” the first opera performed in the metaverse.

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