Boxing Day is a series of box-shaped poems exploring transition, confinement, and time. There are 52 poems. One for each week of the year.

The Boxing Day performance is a year of a life, condensed into an hour of time, and each performance is different. Between readings, the work is revised. A portion of the text is erased, and new poems are written. The work, on the whole, is a work in transition.

During the performance, each box-shaped poem is projected onto a wall or screen behind Keohane, who reads from the wall, along with the audience. They can choose to read the text, or to read Keohane’s body, speech, and movements, the way a clinical psychologist would. In Ireland, in order to receive transgender healthcare within the public healthcare system, you must first receive a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a clinical psychologist, and there’s a waiting list for this appointment. Recent research from Transgender Europe found that trans people in Ireland are waiting up to 10 years for their first assessment. This makes Ireland the worst country in all of Europe for trans healthcare. Boxing Day partially explores this experience of waiting, indefinitely, to be assessed.

Boxing Day debuted, three years ago, at The Ulster Museum, in association with the Seamus Heaney Centre. Since then, Keohane has toured this work in 16 locations across the UK and Europe, including Glasgow, Helsinki, Reykjavík, and Dublin, where it was nominated for the First Fortnight Award at the Dublin Fringe Festival, in 2023.

Over the past three years, the work has changed and revised as it has been in transition. On Friday the 14th of February at 6pm, Keohane will perform, once again, the very first draft of Boxing Day, from 2022, and return us to the beginning.