Festival Season

(This post written by Kathleen, who takes full responsibility for any factual errors.)

(Tap on a photo to read the caption!)

For John and me, the second week of August was a three-festival-, two-fireworks-show-week!  And it happened to coincide with my birthday.

Doubtless there is a festival in multiple places in Bretagne every day of the summer.  As in Seattle, where the climate is similar, the Bretons make as much hay as they can during the few months when the sun shines (and the weather is warm).  Summer is one long season of festivals—of music (traditional, jazz, classical, rock, world), of boats and sailing ships, of giant photos mounted outdoors, of food (a favorite obsession in France).  Religious feasts of the patron saint of a village, church, or chapel.  Original and unusual festivals, like the one we went to on the Fête Nationale (Bastille Day) last year which features a “course aux lits”—a race in which the participants are mounted on bed frames on wheels and race to the finish line.  There is even a Festival of the Crêpe, which includes a competition for making the world’s largest crêpe!

And apparently Parisians are envious of the Bretons & their festivals, which all, from tiny village Fest-Noz (nighttime celebrations) to big multi-day, multi-stage music concerts, are exclusively organized and managed by Bretons themselves—not an outside promoter or festival organizer.  Each festival is joyfully staffed by hundreds of volunteers, thus investing locals in the pride of their celebration.  

Though there are a multitude of themes, for many festivals the heart-and-soul is a celebration of local Breton heritage and culture, a culture which has seen a renaissance in the last 4 or 5 decades.  The Breton language was banned in schools until 1951, and we have spoken to quite a few older adults who never learned the language of their parents, and thus didn’t pass it on to their children.  As with many regional minorities, the Bretons are claiming and reclaiming their distinctive culture and their language, even as the French government resists giving support to regional languages such as Breton, Basque, Alsatian, Occitan, Catalan…  (France has not been able to ratify the 1992 European Charter of European and Minority Languages, due to a constitutional issue but also due to an ideal held by many lawmakers of “one Republic, one language,” which dates back to the Revolution and sees minority languages as a threat to French cohesion.  But that is a subject for another post…). “Diwan” schools (both public and private) are flourishing, teaching an all-Breton or bilingual Breton-French curriculum to a new generation of children.  The festivals are an occasion for artisans to introduce and proudly display their traditional techniques, for young and old to parade in costumes specific to each village, for musicians to play the traditional Breton tunes and dancers to demonstrate the traditional Breton dances.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

For us, a highlight of the festivals has been the Fest-Noz, these outdoor nighttime celebrations where bands play a musical hybrid, combining traditional Breton tunes and/or instruments—the biniou or bagpipes, the accordian, the bombard which is a high-pitched reed instrument in appearance like a small oboe—with guitar, bass, drums and contemporary rhythms of rock or blues or jazz or funk.  People of ALL ages gather to join in the traditional dance forms, many of them circle dances or line dances which snake and weave and undulate, where the participants join pinkie fingers and pack the dance floor!  Even if you don’t know the dance steps, you are welcome—just link your pinkie to the closest person and do your best to follow along.  Many of the simple line or circle dance steps date to the Breton agricultural communities of the 19th century or earlier, when everyone would come to together to pound the earthen floor of a new home, or to prepare a threshing floor.  Today’s Fest-Noz seem to us to be a joyful, inclusive celebration of Breton culture, an identity that you are born to but that you are also welcome to choose to enter into.  (That would be us!).

Fest-Noz at the Festival de Cornouaille in Quimper

The ultimate experience of Fest-Noz for us this summer was the closing of the Fête des Bruyères—the Heather Festival in Beuzec-Cap-Sizun, on the north coast of Cap Sizun, where fields of pink, mauve, and sometimes orange heather bloom right down to the cliffs overlooking the sea. 

It rained that day—the opening parade came off without a hitch, and many of the traditional dance and music groups were able to perform…  

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

….until the skies opened and the rest of the afternoon program was scuttled.  A long break for the thousand or more people attending to line up at the food booths for mussels with fries or sausages (more than half of French pork comes from Brittany) with fries, for crêpes or kouign amann (literally, “butter cake,” whose name you understand after one bite).  Later that night, the Fest-Noz began, and so did the rain, again.  But the throngs, of all ages, filled the huge outdoor festival space, dancing to song after song after song under sheets of rain, laughing and smiling breathlessly, enthusiasm clearly NOT dampened, even if they were.  (Seattleites would fit right in.). A celebration of pure JOY.

And when the rain stopped, at 11 pm, there were fireworks.  Seems they are requisite at any festival worth its crêpes.  At the Poissonade (an outdoor seafood fest) in the small town of Primelin—where you could buy soupe de poissons for 3.5 euros, mussels or grilled sardines for 4, and John and I had fish kebabs for 5.5 euros — the concert of Breton rock was followed by fireworks over the bay, in the same sky where we had earlier watched the quartet we’d been following all month:  Venus setting, and Mercury rising, and Jupiter and Saturn twinkling in between the two.  Magical, all of it.  (I always wanted a fireworks show for my birthday…)

 *****

And now it is the end of the festival season.  Summer is officially over today, the day of la rentrée, everyone back to work and to school.  We have been quite itinerant this festival season—yesterday we moved to our 11th lodging since we arrived in France 8 weeks ago.  (We’re a bit impatient for October, when we can begin moving into our apartment in Quimper…)  August was spent in Cap Sizun, in and around the town of Audierne.  We LOVE Cap Sizun, with its wild coastline alternating with pockets of clean sandy beaches; and Audierne, a maritime capital since Roman times, in the 19th century a sardine fishing center until the sardines up and left for waters further south in the early 20th century.  It is still a fishing port, and we enjoyed watching the boats depart in the early morning hours, returning in mid-afternoon or later with their catch.  Increasingly Audierne welcomes pleasure craft, as well as French (and many German) families vacationing, with water sports for everyone—splashing, sailing, surfing, windsurfing, stand-up paddleboard, kayaking…

“How do you spend your days?” is a question we’ve been asked. 

Think of a fireworks display, how you can watch the ascent of each rocket, without knowing what it will open into, curiously awaiting each “ooh” and “aah…”.  In general we start out with an idea of the trajectory of a day, but we stay open to whim and whimsy and allow the day to answer to our needs & desires.  John and I walk, along the quai or the coastline or river or field.  We visit the tiny medieval and baroque chapels which dot the countryside.  We go to festivals!  We explore towns and villages and hamlets, taking any road that strikes our fancy, discovering sweet corners of beauty and charm.  We delight in the market days (Saturdays in Audierne) when the bounty of the region is available—fresh produce, cheeses, ciders, baked goods, honey, roasted chickens, prepared dishes, specialty foods—at prices that are affordable.  We try to engage with everyone we meet and the connections delight us.

 

I had always lived in big cities (well, except for that JVC year in Great Falls, Montana), and had never experienced the personal scale of small-town life.  In addition to deepening a handful of existing relationships, already we have crossed paths with numerous people we met last year, people who have made us feel welcome, who remembered us (Americans are a rare breed out here in the wild west of Bretagne) and are tickled that we have actually made the move we talked about with them last summer!  We have only one rule that supersedes any plans we may have made:  Accept every invitation that comes our way.  As much like a fairy-tale this place and this beauty may seem to us at times—pinching ourselves to check if this is all actually REAL—it is the connections that we treasure.  Our lives have always been about community, and we seek and hope for those riches here, too.  We are blessed already to be meeting interesting people and building friendships.  And I am ABSOLUTELY THRILLED to be doing it all in French, my first true love!

Contemporary take on traditional dance by Quimper dance circle