Place aux étoiles! combines astronomy and performance in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. Telescope observations organised with astronomy partners sit alongside an immersive mapping show, street arts, acrobatics and an illuminated promenade. Family activities and local producers’ stalls complete the programme presented by Le Belvédère and its partners.
Region: centre-val-de-loire
Piano Saltimbanque in Verdigny: Elegant Concert
Francis Clup and Sophie Parel perform Piano Saltimbanque in Verdigny. The concert belongs to the Cher cultural season Sur les pas de George Sand. It forms part of the writer’s commemoration, bringing a piano performance to the village within a wider programme connecting music and Sand’s place in Berry’s cultural life.
Choir Workshop in Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre: Music Exploration
Gwennaëlle Lemaire-Debarnot leads a choral workshop for Les Milliaires in Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre. The theme Alliances spans repertoire from the Middle Ages to the present, selected with the conductor. Group teaching and sectional work lead towards a final concert, alongside the festival’s programme in George Sand country.
Concert in Gargilesse-Dampierre: Tribute to George Sand
Mezzo-soprano Camille-Taos Arbouz and harpist Alexander Boldachev perform Pauline, Frédéric et les autres… at Gargilesse’s summer festival. Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Schumann feature in the programme. The concert accompanies the George Sand commemoration and the festival’s attention to women artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Festival Pierres qui chantent in Pouligny-Notre-Dame: Folk &
Duo Guidat/Mooken and Duo Bonnin/Campin perform at the church in Pouligny-Notre-Dame for Pierres qui chantent en Vallée Noire. Guitar and percussion move between flamenco, jazz and Celtic influences in the first duo’s programme. The second draws on mazurkas, bourrées and waltzes associated with folk balls, within the festival’s circuit of local churches.
Fêtes Franco-Écossaises in Aubigny-sur-Nère: Scottish Celebre
Aubigny-sur-Nère’s Fêtes Franco-Écossaises celebrates the town’s historical relationship with Scotland. Scottish clans, pipe bands, a Grand Tattoo and a parade take part in the gathering. Ceremonies at the Auld Alliance monument and the French Pipe Band Championships connect the musical programme with the Stuart town’s shared heritage.
George Sand Tribute in Gargilesse-Dampierre: Art Display
Ce que disent les arbres brings paintings and drawings by Christiane Sand and Louis Jourdan to Gargilesse-Dampierre. Nature provides the subject of the works in this tribute to George Sand. The exhibition places the two artists’ interpretations within a village associated with the writer, joining contemporary images and literary remembrance.
Photographic Exhibition in Nohant: Presence and Absence
Je suis dans des mondes étranges presents photographs made during FLORE’s residency at Nohant, the home closely associated with George Sand. Waxed silver prints, watercolor prints and one-off works on lithographic stone give the series a deliberately material presence. Across the house and garden, the artist studies presence and absence through the remembered separation of Sand and Frédéric Chopin. Guided movement through those spaces lets architecture, landscape and photographic surface carry parts of the narrative. The historic home becomes an active witness to intimacy, distance and memory as rooms and paths enter the photographic sequence. FLORE’s residency links contemporary image-making with Nohant’s literary and musical history, creating a focused encounter between photography, place and two figures whose relationship still shapes the site’s cultural imagination.
De Londres à Edimbourg in Plaimpied-Givaudins: Music Duo
La Rêveuse brings De Londres à Edimbourg to Plaimpied-Givaudins in collaboration with Noirlac. Florence Bolton and Benjamin Perrot perform English music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their programme follows exchanges between traditional and composed repertories as part of the Nouvelles Traversées festival’s wider activity.
Laissez Verdure Exhibition in Bourges: Artistic Reflection
Laissez verdure begins with George Sand’s final words and treats them as an ecological challenge with meaning beyond a commemorative slogan. Young artists from ENSA Bourges ask how that brief phrase might speak to the environmental questions of the present. Art historian Stéphanie Jamet and artist Vanessa Fanuele shape the project with studio managers Hugo Bonnet-Massip and Jessie Morin, giving the work a genuinely collective authorship. The exhibition unfolds as a tale that looks forward, captured in the phrase Il sera une fois. By joining Sand’s language with emerging artistic practice, the project makes Bourges a place where literary memory can generate new images of nature, responsibility and possible shared futures.