Cân y Bugail

Think of Europe. What is it? Cities, states, institutions? Bridges, highways and railways? Galleries, theatres and parks? Think again. Ask yourself who lives here, above you, outside your city, un-noticed but not forgotten? From the pillars of Hercules to the Arctic Circle and south to the Balkans, Europe is also people and their animals : sheep, goats, reindeer, cattle and horses.

We speak languages as old as the glaciers that formed our mountains, preserving a universal and diverse culture: a specific sense of the local and global from our lived experience. We are not peripheral. From our point of view we are at the centre of our worlds. You buy our wool, our meat, our cheeses, our wines and cider. We preserve a shared landscape and keep a memory alive that has greeted every new year under the open skies outlasting Rome, the wars of princes and kings, industry and the internet. We are poets, parents, artists, philosophers, dancers and lovers. Come, take our hands and sing with us!

Cân y Bugail is a phrase in Cymraeg – Welsh – the language of the western tip of Europe. In English it means “the shepherd’s song”. In 2007 Meic Llewellyn and Danny KilBride heard a CD of Corsican shepherd choirs in their office in Trallwng, mid-Wales and immediately heard a sound and culture similar to the shepherd Plygain choirs who only sing at midnight at the turn of the old, pre Roman year in the villages and churches in the valleys that surrounded them.

Since then they’ve been building networks of cultural activists and organisations who work with the original languages of Europe to bring this into being.

Now we are a group of committed partners in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Euskal Herria, Serbia and Fryslan, working to extend our reach across Europe. We are beginning a process of listening, sharing and building a celebration of Europe’s marginalised communities – hosted in farms and villages yet linked via the internet. Culture for us is not a thing to be defined, it’s a way of life, an expression of our humanity to be lived. It manifests itself in song, food, poetry, buildings and dances, in faith & debate, in sharing meanings with others and by stewarding a living network of relationships between people, animals, plants & land often expressed in languages that have themselves evolved in these landscapes.

We’re building networks and finding partners to deliver and stage a Europe-wide celebration of our culture. We’re holding these events in kitchens, village halls, community centres, fields, mountain tops and town squares. We’ll be commissioning new work that engages IT as well as more conventional performances and exhibitions. We’ll be challenging and re-inventing our traditions, eating and singing together, breaking bread and the barriers of art versus craft, high art and low culture and speaking to each other in as many tongues as there are people to speak them. Come and join us!