From May 30 to June 6, the Total Festum puts Occitan at the heart of Saint-Girons: concerts, balls, workshops and conferences.
In Saint-Girons, the Total Festum programs much more than a simple succession of events around Occitan. Coordinated again this year by the Calandreta deth Coserans bilingual school, the Occitan en Couserans association and the departmental SMAC Art’Cade, the meeting now affirms a decidedly broader ambition: to make Occitan (and here Gascon) culture a space for circulation and transmission.
Created on a regional scale by the Occitanie region, the Total Festum brings together dozens of municipalities each year around Occitan and Catalan languages and cultures. But in Saint-Girons, the event takes on a particular color with a real “Occitan Week” (“Setmana de l’Occitan”), deployed over several days between the city center, the market, the town hall, the Ateliers de la liberté, the Tribunal park and the Exhibition center.
The program for this 2026 edition invites transmission, reflection, dance and the discovery of beautiful cultural singularities. There we will discover, among other things, folk dances with Los Desentutats d’Ariejo, a conference by Jordi Labouysse dedicated to “Women of Oc engaged in their century”, workshops around the Couserannese soufflé with Philippe Bourges from Bethmalais, open discussions in Occitan to all supported by the Occitan Circle of Couserans or, unmissable, the conference by Alice Traisnel on pastoralism and language.
Far from a fixed approach to heritage, this week highlights a culture that is practiced, alive, spoken and reinvented collectively. Specificity: children resolutely occupy a central place in this edition.
An open and moving Occitan
Thus, students from the Occitan sections of the Fanny-Reich school, Mont-Valier college and Calandreta deth Coserans will meet for a concert-ball with Les Biroussans, Friday June 5, illustrating this direct link between school transmission, artistic practice and local life.
The finale on Saturday evening, at the Parc des Expositions, will extend this idea of an open and moving Occitan. After the bilingual show “Vira-Vira”, it’s time for concerts and a neo-trad ball with DJ Faïdit, La Marouette, the duo Cocanha and Oraj.
Between polyphonies, electro-trad and reappropriation of traditions, the evening will shift the Total Festum towards a resolutely contemporary popular festival. This free festival, with the support of the Saint-Girons town hall and numerous associative and private partners, is open to all.
