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Concept
Fest noz
Summary
A fest noz (sometimes hyphenated as fest-noz; Breton for 'night festival') is a Breton traditional festival, with dancing in groups and live musicians playing acoustic instruments.
Although it is all too easy to write off the fest nozou and fêtes folkloriques as modern inventions, most of the traditional dances of the fest noz are ancient, some dating back to the Middle Ages, providing a way for the community to grasp hold of its past and relish a deep sense of being with ancestors and with place.
The plural in Breton is festoù noz, but the Goadec Sisters (a family of traditional singers) used to say festnozoù, and the French may also say in French des fest-noz.
On 5 December 2012 the fest noz was added by UNESCO to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
A fest noz (plural festoù noz) is a traditional dance festival in Brittany. Most Breton dances are social dances, in a group. Currently, many festoù noz are also held outside Brittany within diaspora, bringing the Breton culture to life outside Breton territory. This term is known since the end of the 19th century but is given as a name only since the 1950s.
In the past, the dances were sometimes used to trample the ground to make a firm earth floor in a house or a solid surface for farm work (the "aire neuve" dances), to which people from the neighbourhood were invited, which explains the presence of stamping movements in some of the dances. For a long time the church banned "kof-ha-kof" (stomach-to-stomach) dances, meaning dancing in pairs. These festivals were a chance for young people to meet and size each other up, on a social level, by their clothes, and to see how quickly they got tired, since dances sometimes continued for a long time and involved complex and swift steps that required effort and skill.
These days, festoù noz are still very popular, mixing the different generations. Most of the villages have a fest noz at least once a year, organised by the sports clubs, the school, etc...
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