French Letter: The masks are coming off and Brittany is getting ready to party

Whisper it softly, but with most Covid-19 restrictions about to be abandoned, the Breton fest noz, or night festival — an extravaganza of music and dance — looks set for a comeback. I confess that this will not make a lot of difference to the life my wife and I live in France, but for hundreds, possibly thousands, of village communities, it will be the signal they have been waiting for that the pandemic is finally over. 

The first fest noz we attended was in the late summer of 1999, not long after we bought our house. It was one of the most famous, held in the Ferme du Cosquer, just outside the village of Carnoët, in the far west of the Cotes-d’Armor. 

The farm in question is pretty spectacular — the sort of backdrop film directors dream of for scenes of horror, ribaldry or bucolic over-indulgence. It is owned today by the commune, which in regular times makes a small fortune from the twice-yearly festivals sur plancher (on a sprung wooden floor) that attract visitors for miles around. 

Before Covid, hardly a night went by in the summer without one fest noz or another taking place. The biggest is traditionally held in Rennes, the Breton capital, where as many as 7,000 revellers strut their stuff from dusk to dawn at a gathering known as the Fest Noz Yaouank (yaouank being, I’m told, the native word for young, or youth). 

But much more typically, the knees-up is a village affair, to which everyone is invited. It doesn’t matter what age you are, when the music strikes up, you know where you have to be. 

In 2020 and ’21, all such celebrations were sadly muted affairs, with participants wearing masks and doing their best to remain two metres apart. 

It didn’t work. Breton dancing is very much a hands-on affair — the opposite, you might say, of Irish step-dancing — and the result left much to be desired. The music was there, up on stage, but the soul of the event was missing, and only the most committed turned up. 

This year, they say, it will be an all-singing, all-dancing summer, featuring every song and dance in the repertoire. If it isn’t, there will be a lot of resentment and even more long faces.

The music is central. Typically, there will be Breton pipes (less complicated than Ireland’s uilleann pipes but a lot more strident); a bombard, or talabard (like a Scottish chanter but, oddly, a lot louder); an accordion, guitar and fiddle. 

The tunes played have mostly been passed down the generations and are geared to the various forms of the dance, which range from stately gavottes to frantic gallops, with waltzes in-between. 

All Bretons, it seems to me, are born knowing how to dance. There are classes, of course, held each winter and spring in the maisons-communales, but these are mainly for incomers and expats. The locals start dancing at school, and by the time they reach puberty, they are ready to hit the floor. 

I won’t attempt to describe the different forms the dances take, save to say that they are intricate, involving either pairs, groups of four or the entire floor, with speed and direction of travel dictated by the music on stage. 

Everyone knows precisely what to do, adjusting speed and footwork as if in response to some distant choreographer using a tv remote. 

To me, it is as much of a mystery today as it was in 1999, and I have yet to set foot on the dance floor. I wouldn’t dare. 

But I watch with fascination each year at the Ferme du Cosquer as the entire village twists and turns as if it were a single entity even when linked to each other by no more than crooked little fingers. 

There are stars, of course. Les Frères Morvan, now reduced from four to just two, are among the best known. They specialise in what is known as call and response singing (kan ha diskan), in which sung phrases are repeated and echoed as if by competing metronomes. 

The remaining frères, now approaching their eighties, are revered figures throughout central Brittany. When I spoke to one once, and he answered, I was reminded of the time I met Muhammed Ali in New Orleans. “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” I somehow gushed. “Well, now you have,” came the laconic reply. 

Another group of singers, remembered long after their deaths, are the three Goadec Sisters, immortalised in bronze, like a 3D version of a painting by Daumier, in Carhaix’s main square, next to the George-Zinc café. 

If the sisters choose to look up, their eyes must surely fix on the rears, lifted out of their saddles, of a quartet of Breton winners of the Tour de France, also cast in bronze, who perennially sprint up a hill the summit of which they are destined never quite to reach.

Isn’t that just a metaphor for life? 

I should mention that, as my mother would have put it, drink is taken at your typical fest noz — mostly beer, but also the local hard-stuff, known as lambig, which will do more than take the skin off your custard. Food, as a restorative, takes the form of frites, sausages and slices of what is now widely thought of as France’s national dish: pizza. 

The word, as I say, is that no obstacles will be placed in the way of the return of the fest noz to Brittany this summer. I really hope that is the case. Good people. May they dance till they drop.