Festival Alors... Raconte !

The magic of storytelling in Tarn-et-Garonne

Every year in January-February, Tarn-et-Garonne enters a unique season. It's not a climatic season—even though winter then blows over the plains of Quercy—but a season of words, stories, and imagination. Alors... Raconte! takes over the department for several weeks, bringing the voices of storytellers to villages, media libraries, schools, and village halls throughout the region.

Created in 1996 by the Association des Amis de la Médiathèque Départementale de Tarn-et-Garonne, this festival is one of the oldest storytelling festivals in France. Nearly thirty years after its founding, it remains true to its original ambition: to democratize access to the art of storytelling, to make living words a cultural experience accessible to everyone, everywhere in the department, and for free.

A traveling festival throughout the department

What makes Alors... Raconte! original and strong is its resolutely traveling nature. Unlike most festivals that concentrate in a single city, the festival travels through about fifteen communes in Tarn-et-Garonne each year. Montauban, of course, the departmental capital, but also Moissac, Castelsarrasin, Beaumont-de-Lomagne, Bruniquel, Lauzerte, Auvillar, Puylaroque, Saint-Nicolas-de-la-Grave, Dieupentale, Montbeton, and others—so many villages and towns that open their doors to the words of storytellers for one or more evenings.

This extensive geography is a political statement: culture and storytelling are not reserved for the regulars of large urban performance halls. They belong to everyone, to those who live in the countryside and small towns as well as to those in urban centers. Every evening of the festival, a hall—sometimes in a village of a few hundred inhabitants—transforms into a magical space where a community gathers to listen, laugh, shiver, and dream together.

Storytellers from around the world

Since its inception, Alors... Raconte! has always had an international vocation. Each year, the festival invites storytellers from all backgrounds—France, Belgium, West Africa, Latin America, Northern Europe—who bring with them their oral traditions, their imaginations, and their languages. This openness to the world makes the festival a window onto the diversity of human cultures and narratives.

The invited storytellers are high-level professional artists, some of whom are major figures on the international storytelling scene. They practice a living, demanding art that mobilizes the voice, body, gaze, and relationship with the audience. No sets, no artifice: just a storyteller, their words, and shared imagination. This is the very definition of the art of storytelling, and it's what the festival has offered its audiences for nearly thirty years.

Among the regularly invited artists are nationally renowned storytellers such as Nicolas Bourdon, Sylvie Monbo, Frédéric Naud, Bernard Barbier, Luigi Rignanese, Kyung Wilputte, but also artists from Africa or other continents who enrich the festival's palette with their ancestral oral traditions.

Free and without reservation, for everyone

One of the founding principles of Alors... Raconte! is its total freeness. All storytelling evenings, all school activities, and all youth sessions are free and without reservation. This principle, maintained since the festival's origins, is a strong choice that reflects the philosophy of the organizing association: the art of storytelling is a common good, and no one should be excluded from it for financial reasons.

This freeness makes the festival particularly family-friendly. Children are welcomed as honored guests. Specific youth sessions are offered, adapted to their ages and imaginative worlds. Many families make the Estivales a winter tradition, rediscovering each year the special atmosphere of these evenings where words bring generations together.

A memorable 30th edition

The 2025 edition marked a turning point in the festival's history: its 30th edition (counting the years since 1996, with an interruption during Covid). Thirty years of storytelling in Tarn-et-Garonne, thirty years of voices given and received, thirty years of connections woven between storytellers from around the world and the inhabitants of the department. The association celebrated this anniversary with a particularly rich program, welcoming artists who embody the diversity and excellence of contemporary storytelling.