France’s Annual Celtic Rendez-Vous

Talk about the tie that binds!   If you have Celtic roots in your family or kilts and bagpipes, where do you go for the first 10 days and nights of August each year?   You head for the fishing port town of Lorient on France’s Brittany coast. Here you’ll find the  world’s largest festival honoring Celtic culture that annually draws more than half a million visitors, for a kaleidoscopic series of some 200 concerts and other events performed by more than 4,500 Celtic artists.   Most come from Brittany itself or from such well known, nearby bastions of Celtic culture as Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and the Isle of Man.  But because the Celts throughout history have meandered all over the world, those who still strive to keep their cultural heritage alive, make the trip from places as far away as The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Argentina. This year’s featured guests, in fact, will be representatives of the Celtic community in Asturies on the northern coast of Spain.   Music- jazz, rock, country, symphonic and more, is the festival’s bedrock.  Though, the events also include films, art exhibits, modern and classical dance, and discussion groups galore that are all focused on aspects of Celtic culture.   First held in 1971, but transformed three years ago into an annual get-together, the Lorient festival’s distinguishing characteristic is its determination to bring together the traditions and representatives of the myriad Celtic communities scattered around the globe.   Celtic festivals had been long established in one or another of those communities, but usually with only a local or regional focus before Lorient decided to go international.   Lorient’s efforts have paid off.  Last year, they had 500,000 visitors and Lorient’s organizers are predicting 600,000 or more attendants this year during the festival’s run from August 1 through August 10.   All of this is, is of course dependent on the event escaping the fate of many major summer festivals in France that have been forced to close down, because of strikes or harassment by part-time theater workers protesting proposed diminution of their government benefits during times they are not employed. But some festivals, particularly in Brittany, have survived by enlisting the support of the local populace to resist close-down pressures. The “Interceltique de Lorient” has joined with other Brittany festivals to mount such a resistance and believes it too, will weather the storm.   That is no small matter for Brittany, which strongly utilizes the festival to strengthen the province’s distinctive and fiercely protected cultural identity within the French state.   The Celtic people, it is generally agreed, originated near what is now southeastern Germany in roughly the second millennium BC.  Individual tribes spread out over centuries to the near East, Italy, the Balkans and the British Isles. They were among the most dominant forces of the iron age but their influence waned in the last years of the first millennium BC and gradually most fell in one way or another under Roman rule.   Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles known then as Bretons, speaking a Celtic tongue somewhat akin to Welsh, led the settlement of Brittany in the fifth century AD.  Most had fled across the English channel to avoid oppression by stronger tribes of Anglo-Saxons and they considered their new homeland on the continent a sort of new Britain from which its name of Brittany evolved.   Today Brittany maintains one of France’s strongest Roman Catholic traditions. It was long royalist and resistant to the populist and anti-clerical credos of the French revolution and prides itself on one of the highest economic and educational levels in the nation.   [I am not sure what “it” is referring to.]It vaunts the Festival and Brittany as symbols of the way that minority cultural entities can function successfully as part of a larger nation such as France or international grouping such as the European Union, without necessarily abandoning their distinctive heritage.   Distinctive it is.  Where else would you find 600 bagpipe players huffing and puffing together, or some 1,000 Breton folk dancers tapping and stomping all at one go, or concerts of pipe bands or of  Irish Harp players and a Celtic parade featuring 3,500 musicians singers and dancers?   This is just a sample, and certainly worth a look even without the Celtic roots, unless you simply can’t stand bagpipes.   ________________________________________________________________________ Information about specific program events, lodging, parking and admission is available at:   FESTIVAL INTERCELTIQUE DE LORIENT Telephone:      33 (0)2 97 21 24 29 Fax:                  33 (0)2 97 64 34 13 Internet        :   http://www.festival-interceltique.com E Mail             [email protected]   HOTEL INFORMATION AND RESERVATIONS Telephone:      33 (0)2 97 21 07 84 Fax:                 33 (0)2 97 21 99 44