Oona Doherty is fascinated by extinction, as well as survival—of her own Belfast working-class origins and, in the case of her latest dance-theater work, the Irish folk ways that flit through them. Specky Clark follows the trail of the choreographer’s great-great-grandfather, an orphan at 10 who ends up in the clutches of two spinster fairy twins. They raise him, in a manner of speaking. “When my dad is telling me stuff about Specky Clark and his grandmother,” Doherty has explained, “in my head I’m mixing bits and pieces together, filling in the gaps with my own imagination.” In Specky Clark, the fantastical seeps into the biographical, animal into human, festival into dirge, the living into the dead. Ten dancers inhabit this surreal, tragicomic realm, backed by tunes from the gloomy Dublin folk band Lankum and polyphonous narration courtesy of a gaggle of delightful Irish actors. —Apollinaire Scherr