A series of printed panels stands in the open air around the Barnenez cairn at Plouezoch. Some thirty pupils of the classe de 6ème at collège François Charles de Plougasnou made them with the artist Lauranne Guyomard. Paintings, collages, visual creations and graphic montages retrace the cairn’s construction, its oblivion and its renaissance. The panels grew out of lessons on prehistory, megalithism and archaeological conservation.
Region: Brittany
Les Théâtrales du Kreiz Breizh
Eight shows travel three communes of the Kreiz Breizh: Gouarec, Rostrenen and St Gilles Pligeaux. The programme is théâtre populaire, open to the amateur companies of the region, and comédie holds a settled place in it. One session, Attroupons-nous, hands a salle des fêtes to troupes of the Centre-Bretagne, who introduce themselves or play an extract of a creation in progress. Every aesthetic and every language is welcome there, at any stage.
Arsonora: Guided tour of the Basilique Saint-Sauveur
A guide and lecturer opens the Basilique Saint-Sauveur in Dinan, nearly nine centuries of building. Its facades, radiating chapels and liturgical furnishings show where Romanesque work gives way to Gothic. The church holds the tomb of Bertrand du Guesclin, the Hundred Years’ War hero whose heart stayed there. The hour belongs to the Arsonora early-music festival, whose medieval repertoire fills the Chapelle des Cordeliers the same evening.
Gouel bro Plistin: thirty years of Dañs Treger
Gouel bro Plistin is the festival the Dañs Treger association built around Breton dance, and this edition marks its thirtieth year. Danse, musique, chant head the programme, with a shared meal, talks and storytelling filling the days between. The screenings are programmed in the Breton language. A salon du livre puts Breton publishing on the same bill as the dancing, at Plestin-les-Grèves on the Côte de Granit Rose.
La vie en bleu: cyanotype at the Château de Quintin
Julie Mainguet brings the old cyanotype technique to the Château de Quintin, and each participant leaves with two plant works in shades of blue. The session is built as a creative and sensory workshop, open from the age of five and taken on booking. Plants or objects brought from home can go into the picture. It sits in Les Minutes Bleues, the festival the Côtes d’Armor stages in 24 hauts lieux du patrimoine naturel et culturel, at dawn or dusk.
Pêr-Vari Kervarec & Caroline Faget: bombarde et piano
Minutes Papillons in Baud hands an evening over to a duo and a Morbihan table. Pêr-Vari Kervarec plays the bombarde and sings; Caroline Faget answers on piano, the reed’s carrying power against the keyboard’s delicacy. Two live sets fall between the courses, at shared tables. The kitchen works from the produce of its own territory and the know-how of local producers, so the gastronomy and the Breton culture arrive on the same plate.
Ferme Perennou Sant-Jakez: a cidre and poiré farm
The farm presses cidre, poiré, apple juice, pear juice and vinegar at Kergleuden, above the Isole valley in Bannalec. Its ground is bocage: old irrigated meadows edged by the apple and pear orchards that fill the presses. Visitors walk that enclosed country and then taste what the fruit became, admission free. A guided turn of the holding can be asked for on arrival. The ciders are raised with no additives, no filtration and no carbonation.
Fest-Deiz in Ploemel: Kastelodenn from Pontivy
The association Dalc’h Atau fills the salle du Groëz Ven at Ploemel with a fest-deiz, the daytime Breton dance gathering. Kastelodenn, casserole in Breton, is a duo of musicians from Pontivy, amateurs-passionnés of Breton music. The two carry a wide span of dances from both Upper and Lower Brittany, coloured by instruments from other folk traditions. Both of them sing as well as play, and the voice leads the floor as often as the instruments.
Madame de Sévigné: décor workshops for children
Vitré’s heritage and museums service invites children from the age of seven into the château for a workshop on ornament. Madame de Sévigné sets the theme, and the group talks through décor, ornementation and orfèvrerie as the marquise’s own century understood them. The newly opened exhibition room supplies the examples to look at closely. Each child then draws, borrows what they like and invents an ornament of their own.
A tête reposée: the skull-box workshop at Saint-Fiacre
When the light goes, the Office de Tourisme Falaises d’Armor gathers a small group at Saint-Fiacre around a Breton usage that slipped out of memory: the boites à crânes. A teller explains what those skull boxes held and why parishes wanted them in plain sight. The talk runs on questions and contes between the explanations. Each participant then shapes a small box to carry home, and a torch belongs in the bag.