Subject Area: Breton Studies

Call to Dance: An Experience of the Socio-Cultural World of Traditional Breton Music and Dance

Wilkinson, Desi
2023 1-4955-1121-9 164 pages
"This book charts the recent historical development of a valued and respected Breton popular cultural identity--both at home and abroad--through the invention and diffusion of an event, the fest noz. This [is a] unique, structured platform for the performance of one of Europe's most vibrant forms of traditional dance music. Informed by the techniques of ethnography, the discipline of ethnomusicology, as well as my own participation as a musician, learner, performer, and researcher, I ...situate the development of the fest noz to highlight its social, cultural, aesthetic, political, and economic significance. I also...convey something of what it looks, sounds, and feels like to circulate as a musician, dancer, and participant in the world of traditional music in Brittany, through forty years around the turn of the twenty-first century." -Desi Wilkinson (Introduction) This book was originally published by Pendragon Press in 2016.