Rencontres Internationales de Luthiers et Maître Sonneurs, Château d'Ars

Welcome to one of the biggest or maybe even THE biggest folk music festival in the world:

Rencontres Internationales de Luthiers et Maître Sonneurs, earlier years held in Saint-Chartier, 8 km from La Châtre where we live (photos below).
Last year this festival moved to Château d'Ars only 3 km from La Châtre and most people earlier visiting Saint-Chartier, seem to have thought this was an even better arrangement.
This was my first visit but Aurore has visited this festival at three occasions when held in Saint-Chartier.
The festival is a possibility for folk musicians all over the world to 'jam' together, listen to artists performing, exchanging experiences and also buying instruments like the vielle, the bagpipe (cornemuse), the accordion (accordéon).
All over the castle park, we could see and listen to musicians, see people dancing different kinds of folk dances but of course there were also food, drink and desserts sold in different booths.
Concerning the food and beverages one applied an ecological and 'nearby cultivated' ideology.

Now to the festival and some pictures.

Below you see some musicians playing together and if they belong to the same group, they come from the same country or not, is unknown to me but music has no barriers, neither geographical nor lingustical.

In these photos (below right and left) we see the group Toad, made up by

Pierre-Vincent Fortunier, 'cornemuse' ('bag pipe'),
Yann Gourdon, 'vielle à roue' ('hurdy gurdy'),

Guilhem Lacroux, guitare.
A lof of people danced along with the music and some knew the specific danses, some didn't.

Below we see a group of dancers performing traditional dances in traditional clothings.

They danced in connection to the performance of Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien.
This could be a group of local dancers from La Châtre but I'm not sure.

Below (left) acccordéons for sale and to the right we see so called 'nyckelharpor' ('nyckelharpa')
The latter is an Scandinavian instrument but in this case the spelling ('nyckelharps') indicates that those displaying these instruments are not from the Scandinavian countries.

A close-up of a 'nyckelharpa'.

Another concert at the same stage as above but unfortunately I don't remember the name of the group.

The tents with food and drink.

This is one of the last groups we listened to, namely Zaragraf:
Mira Mrak (song, accordion), Emmanuel Waffler (song, guitars),
Bruno Manjares (song, guitar, trumpet), Pépé Martinez (song, accordion, cajon, tuba)
They played slavic folk music and among the different pieces of music
we heard the theme song to Emir Kusturica's film 'Time of the Gypsies'.

Below people are dancing a traditional dance called 'bourrée', in french also meaning 'drunk'.

People were dancing everywhere and this is one of the smaller stages, were musicians,
not scheduled for an 'official' concert, could go on stage and perform and then the dance began.
People were not at all shy, even if they couldn't dance properly - whatever that would be.

A group of beautiful harps
(the instrument)

Outside the castle park, on a field, campers from different parts of Europe had gathered.

The photo to the left below is not portraying a musician(?) but a special Berry donkey (I don't use the word 'ass' as you can see):
'The Big Black Donkey' - Âne Grand Noir du Berry'.
In the other photo we see the special 'ear-/hand markings' used even for humans in order to controle us and facilitate at the entrances. We had bought a two day pass for Saturday and Sunday.

The party is over and we got our souvenirs (one cup each),

enabling us to enjoy our drinks in a musical fashion.