Festival Excursion

A couple of days ago, I stumbled across a poster on Facebook for a "circus and theatre festival" in Coustouge. The information on it was minimal -- it just said there would be theatre and circus in the streets of the village all afternoon, and paella and dancing in the evening. It was a lovely day, and it's less than half an hour's drive, so why not?

Coustouge is a lovely village, in the rural Corbières with a pretty stream running along the edge and gorgeous views all around. It has just 100 inhabitants, plus lots of empty houses and probably a fair few second homes. This, the first edition of the festival, was done with no outside funds, entirely organised and run by volunteers, and the artists were paid by passing several hats round.

It was organised by a young couple, Sylvain and Juliette, who moved to the village a couple of years ago, and who feature in my blip. We arrived just before the actual shows started, and walked to the mobile bar in a very windy field outside the village where we were served local organic beer and home-made quiche. We promptly met K, who used to run the Centre Culturel in Ferrals, and C, a member of S's walking club. Although K is very much plugged in to local cultural circuits, she didn't know any more about it than we did and had come along to find out, as we did. C was a bit more clued up because her partner A was playing the accordion in the band that led us around the village to the different outdoor venues.

There were seven, yes seven different shows. All featured acrobatics to a greater or lesser extent, but they were all very different and superbly entertaining. Juliette and Sylvain performed their acrobatics with their babe in arms sleeping in a hammock slung from the structure they were performing on. He was very well behaved and later demonstrated acrobatics of his own, bringing the house down (extra).

This entry would be even more verbose than usual if I recounted all the subsequent acts, but they were all excellent. The guy doing acrobatics on a shopping trolley with his cooperative dog in attendance was particularly striking. We also enjoyed the two guys in total panic mode moving into an invisible house, but you had to be there really. And the final show by two lovely young women featuring a very tall and potentially wobbly pole, deliberately imperfectly secured with slack straps. They survived :)

We'd been there for six hours by the time that was over, so we skipped the paella and came home. It was a really lovely day with never a dull moment -- I'm so glad we went. And we contributed to the hats multiple times. I think a lot more people turned up than the organisers expected, so let's hope they can put it on a firmer footing for the future. Here's a small album.