Celtic music made fiddler Eileen Ivers a star, giving this daughter of Irish immigrants a rich repertoire to mine and embellish as a member of the band Cherish the Ladies, the blockbuster stage show "Riverdance" and her own band, Immigrant Soul, as well as in collaborations with more than 40 symphony orchestras and a range of jazz, rock and world musicians.

Now Ivers gives back to that tradition in her new multimedia show, "Beyond the Bog Road," which tells the story of the Irish diaspora through a high-octane mix of music from Ivers and her band, along with singer Niamh Parsons, Irish and American percussive dance soloists, and a big-screen montage of contemporary and historical photographs and film by video designer DJ Mendel.

"Beyond the Bog Road" comes to the Hopkins Center for the Arts on the Dartmouth College campus in Hanover at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 24. It is the third stop in a two-month tour of North America.

Ivers got her start in New York's Irish-music pubs in the mid 1980s, and quickly drew in fans. Wrote Irish-American writer Frank McCourt in the liner notes to Ivers' 1999 album "Crossing the Bridge," "She's Irish, she's American, she's international. She's the Bronx, Botswana, Ballydehob. She's played solo and with groups in the noisiest pubs and clubs, on cruise ships, in arenas and stadiums and Radio City Music Hall. Eileen is ready to take her fiddle to mountain, prairie, savannah, jungle and bring back the sounds that keep us fresh, that renew us. Like Whitman, she contains multitudes, and cannot be contained by Irish music itself."

Presenting the many dance traditions inspired by Irish music and its offshoots at the New Hampshire show will be Matthew Olwell, a Virginia-based teacher and performer of clogging and other American percussive dance forms; Irish dancer Kristyn Fontanella, who has toured internationally with the top Irish dance shows, including as the star of "Gaelforce Dance"; and dancers from Boston's Cunniffe Academy of Irish Dance.

The stage show will be framed by a narrative, as the music, dance and images focus first on Ireland, in the village of Ivers' own father's birth, and then through the poverty and horrific famine of the mid-1800s that killed millions and drove millions more to emigrate.

In the quickly emptying villages, emigration was known as going "beyond the bog road," the road through the wetlands from which the country people cut peat to dry and burn as fuel. The vessels that carried those immigrants became known as "coffin ships" because so many died en route.

The scene then shifts to North America where Irish people and their music and dance infused the music and dance of Eastern Canada, the Appalachians and Cajun Louisiana; Irish and African American percussive dance traditions merged to create clogging, tap and social dances; and Irish immigrants built the transcontinental railroad and worked as domestics, some clambering to the middle and upper classes. The show ends in the present, celebrating the musical hybrids of Celtic, jazz, rock and world music that Ivers and Immigrant Soul have fueled.

"At the heart of it, this is music of the people, a celebration of life," writes Ivers in the show's program notes. "Some tunes are heartbreakingly sad and others uplifting; some tunes are hundreds of years old and others recently composed in the style of the tradition. It is all honest music of a strong and resilient people who overcame much adversity. It is music which represents the emotions of life in the continuum of a powerful living tradition that has now reached to every corner of the globe."

The daughter of Irish immigrants, Ivers took up the Irish fiddle as a child and went on to win nine All-Ireland fiddle championships, a 10th on tenor banjo and more than 30 championship medals, making her one of the most awarded persons ever to compete in these prestigious competitions. After graduating magna cum laude in mathematics from New York's Iona College, she began playing in the burgeoning Irish music scene of the 1980s.

Never a genre purist, she also played with jazz-, rock- and world music-influenced musicians and in the late 1990s formed the Irish fusion group Immigrant Soul. About that same time, she leaped onto the theatrical stage as a soloist in the smash show "Riverdance," which brought her blazing fiddle playing and winning stage presence to wider audiences in Europe and North America.

Her career has also included solo appearances with more than 40 Symphony Orchestras; projects with such diverse artists as Patti Smith, Paula Cole, Steve Gadd, Al Di Meola, Terence Blanchard, The Chieftains and Sting; and performances as one of the Fiddlers Three, a trio that also included classical violin virtuoso Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and jazz violin great Regina Carter.

Tickets to Eileen Iver's "Beyond the Bog Road" show at the Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hanover on Wednesday, Feb. 24, are $35. For more information, call the box office at 646-2422 or log onto hop.dartmouth.edu.