Despite budget cuts, this Loire-Atlantique region wants to maintain its young audience festival

The subject was put on the table of the municipal council during the debate on the budgetary orientations.

The mayor of Vallet and vice-president in charge of culture in Sèvre et Loire, Jérôme Marchais, spoke of the cut in aid from the Region and the Department of Loire-Atlantique at the cultural level.

To illustrate the impact of these decisions on demonstrations, the first councilor took as an example an important event for the territory: Cep Party.

5000 children welcomed

For twenty years, the young audience festival has welcomed, at each edition, 5,000 children and hundreds of families from the Nantes vineyards during live shows for schools and the general public.

The programming worked by the Champilambart cultural space team calls on to artist companies, which have already been selected for the 2025 edition.

“The next festival is underway. Orders are placed. We have to anticipate,” recognizes the mayor who has just learned that the cuts in subsidies should amount to 22,500 euros for the Department.

And €9,000 for the Region.

“We will have to scale the festival”

It’s a significant financial hole. The 2025 edition will be financially strained. We will have to analyze all the levers on which we can act for the coming years.

Because for the mayor and vice-president for culture in the territory of Sèvre et Loire, there is no “question of stopping Cep Party”.

“The decision is brutal. It’s up to us to bounce back. We will have to put everything into perspective, to scale the festival in relation to our means,” continues the mayor, not included, who “does not wish to enter into a political debate”.

To continue Cep Party, elected officials will have to look at everything: the question of prices, participation, whether or not to continue shows for familiesles adolescents…

Music schools also affected

In financial difficulty, the Department also freezes its aid to music schools.

For the two intercommunal music schools (Divatte-sur-Loire and Vallet), this decision will have consequences on the budgetary balance (tens of thousands of euros less).

Here too, we will have to look at how we rework the subject. There are things that we proposed before that we may no longer be able to do.

For the vice-president of Sèvre et Loire, it will be difficult to blame this political decision on taxpayers through an increase in prices.

“A country without culture is a country that is dying”

In a territory which has signed a territorial cultural project with the Department, the elected official, convinced “that a country without culture is a country which is dying”, says he is “disappointed with the reductions”.

Especially since the territory is developing this cultural project.

Latest illustration to date, the urban and municipal communities of the Nantes Vineyard were to sign an associated artist agreement last December with the NGC25 dance company.

The latter was canceled and postponed.

The project who were awaiting a grant from the Department must be reviewed.

A sign of the “boomerang effect” that these decisions have on all cultural policies.

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