Bringing Halloween home - in four months!

It has been a big ask. Not alone putting together a major international festival, but also putting together the concept of it.  And on top of that, spreading it across three different places in two counties.
Andy Brydon, curator of PUCA, Ireland’s new three-day festival commissioned by Failte Ireland to celebrate Halloween, hopes that he and his team at UK events management company, Curated Place, have managed to do this, even though they only had about four months to pull it all together.
He arrived in Trim last week to oversee the final preparations and set-up for the new festival, which promises to be a spectacle of light and a feast of music and dance.
“It’s been all go,” he said. “Normally on a project of this scale, we would spend 12 to 18 months, but we’ve only had four, as obviously Halloween can’t move, so we had to hit the October deadline.
 “So it has been a colossal, amazing, undertaking for the team, as they pull together not only the festival, but also the whole concept of it – the feel  - the look – and to build the right team of people around it in a short period of time.”
PUCA opens in the home of Halloween, Athboy, this evening, Thursday, 31st October, with the lighting of the symbolic Samhain fire on the Hill of Ward,  with Trim and Drogheda as the main venues for music, song, parades and illuminations over the following days.
“Right now we have a bunch of our own equipment on the road, artists are packing up, bringing big installations, and musicians are preparing for their performances,” Brydon says when we met him in Trim Castle Hotel last week.
Trackways were being put down on the Porchfields in Trim for vehicles as generators, tents, staging and audio-visual gear began to arrive.
“Gradually these build the layers to what will become the heart of the festival – the artistry, bringing together the great storytellers, great performers, and to bring to life the characters of Samhain,” he says. 
Brydon’s company, Curated Place, is an international arts and events company that won the Failte Ireland tender for the festival, he believes because of its arts background pushing it over the line.
“We came from an arts background more than an events background, and grew into running events. We have a close relationship working with artists who make new and original work for a given place, not something that’s readymade being dropped on a circuit.”
“We storytell with people about places, rather than just having a product that we would deliver.”
Brydon explains the company has been involved with the Spectra, Aberdeen’s Festival of Light in Scotland, since 2015. 
“We started with 10,000 visitors in 2015, this had grown to 100,000 this year.”
The company also worked with the Reykjavik Winter Light Festival in Iceland, working closely with Visit Reykjavik to develop and deliver a series of major new art works from Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Canada, Norway and the UK, and a big music festival for Hull as UK City of Culture in 2017, with singer songwriter John Grant and 47 acts from across the UK and Nordic nations.
The task in Ireland was to “Bring Halloween Home”, getting down to the origins of the festival at Tlachtga on the Hill of Ward.
“So it’s not about pumpkins or wicked witch of the west stuff,” Brydon explains.
“It’s bringing to life the folk tales and the characters. My background is in anthropology and I’ve always been interested in all of that. The first person we talked to was Billy McFlynn in Dingle, who is one of about only five people with a PhD in Irish folklore in the country.
“He was massively helpful in putting in context where all this stuff came from. He gave us a great perspective and understanding on what is fixed and what isn’t  - the life of folklore is that you can interpret it, and I think that’s why people really get fired by it, because you can make your own understanding of it, it’s not set on writings.
“We’ve also worked with the people who ran the various events in Athboy in recent years, and Steve Davis, the archaeologists who did the digs on the Hill of Ward, who has been instrumental in helping us tell the stories, and getting concrete, factual information right.”
Brydon points out that this is the first year of the festival, with a short run-in, and that it is something that can be built on year after year, with more and more people as it grows. 
One of the biggest challenges was the fact that it is over three locations at the same time, rather than at one location as they would normally be working on a festival.
“A lot of people want to see a lot of things happen, how to manage the expectations in year one has been a challenge,” he says.
Already, he says, 3,500 people are signed up to come on Thursday night, with more expected, and there is very positive feedback on social media. 
“I think people will be impressed by what they see,” Brydon says. “The feedback is great, there’s great buzz around the whole event, there is definitely an appetite there for bringing to life something that is drawn on the Irish tradition, not taking that American version of Halloween.”