Lorient (AFP)
Fewer Celtic nations present, but new musical trends: the Lorient Inter-Celtic Festival on Sunday reconnected with its audience, which came by the thousands despite health constraints.
An unusual calm was invited to this edition in reduced format, for the first weekend of festivities.
"It has changed" blow some festival-goers, but it is a "lesser evil" for others, given the health context, after the cancellation of the 2020 edition due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
While Europe still lives under the regime of restrictions, coming to the festival has sometimes been an "obstacle course": a Scottish delegate who left Scotland and passed through Ireland had to do quarantine before being able to reach Lorient, says Festival director Lisardo Lombardia.
The Festival traditionally welcomes several Celtic nations, including Acadia, Asturias, Cornwall, Galicia, Scotland, Ireland and Australia.
Not all the delegations made the trip this year, but "our family is still represented", tempers Lisardo Lombardia.
The Moustoir stadium sounds a bit hollow and the enclosure is barely half full on Sunday morning, to host the parade of the great interceltic parade, this emblematic sequence of the festival.
This edition opened on Friday and continues until August 15, but with greatly reduced programming and resources: only 80 shows will be presented, against 200 in 2019, and 700 volunteers are mobilized there instead of the usual 1,700.
- 50 years of the festival -
Quimper, Plomeur, Concarneau, Saint-Malo, Lorient, the origin of the fifty bagads leave little room for doubt: this year, Brittany is being honored for the 50th anniversary of the Festival, created in 1971 .
Under the sun and in front of a crowd of 7,000 spectators whose applause punctuates the parade, the bagad of Lann-Bihoué opens the ball.
The formation, made up of around thirty professional musicians from the French Navy, resonates with bagpipes, percussions and bombards, this wind instrument, typically Breton.
In the stands of the Moustoir, Michel Allain, camera in hand, scrutinizes the passage of the bagad of Locminé (Morbihan) in which he played for 15 years.
A regular at the festival, the sixty-year-old says he regrets "the atmosphere in the streets", so characteristic of the event, but also the "melting pot with other Celtic nations".
In the aisles of the interceltic market, Louise Beauvais and Pauline Baudais, 18, students, come to the festival for the first time.
"We expected to find an older audience, this is not the case. And seeing the children parading in the parade in the footsteps of their parents, it shows the transmission of Breton culture", observes Louise.
- Renew the formula -
Christophe Le Fée, alias Krismenn, remembers well his childhood at the festival and the "long parades in the rain with a snare of ten kilos in the hands".
Coming from traditional music, the rapper, who mixes electronic sounds, hip-hop and lyrics in Breton, began with the bagad, his gateway to Breton culture.
"Bagad is a popular way of understanding music. It's cheaper than music lessons and that's when I realized that young people were speaking Breton," he says.
After performing on Saturday in front of "1,000 to 1,200 people" according to the organizers, the artist describes a "special moment", he who had "almost forgotten the good it felt" to present his work to the public.
However, he pleads for "rejuvenating" the formula of the festival, in particular its programming.
"Artists who sing in Celtic languages need more visibility, that these languages be more present", he explains, suggesting a rap party in Celtic language.
"The mix is there", nuance however Lisardo Lombardia, who will hand over at the end of this festival.
"In the 80 groups present, 40% are not folk singers, but from electronic music, urban, representatives of new trends," he underlines.
© 2021 AFP