Tuatha Dé Dannan, Puppet Concept Sketches, 2021

Street Performance concept piece
*Work in progress*

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The objective of this project is to explore the origin and history of the characters of the Tuatha De Dannan and creatively express the similarities and connections they have with other countries and cultures. The Goddess Danu has been associated with the Danube River, Europe’s second largest river, with the Celts naming it Danuvius. But her history goes much further back to 1500bc where she appears in Vedic Sanskrit in India as the goddess Danu whose name is associated with water. The story of the God Lugh has been compared in similarity to that of the story of the greek god Perseus. Ireland has this incredible history of diversity. When you reflect on the earliest days of settlement, people and communities came from every direction and amalgamated to form the foundations of what our culture and beliefs have been built on. This project seeks to explore those foundations. How the concept of the famous Irish fairy links back to ancient gods and goddess of the Tuatha Dé Dannan whose roots lie in Hinduism, Norse mythology, Greek mythology and more.

In an Ireland which is becoming increasingly diverse and multicultural, I think it is important to take the time to find similarities in these cultures for so many of them connect at certain points of time. The project’s aim is to make us reflect on what Irishness is, and the influences many other cultures have had on ours through centuries of migration and settlement.

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