Briga likes to move.

So, if you’re going to take in one of her shows at the TD Sunfest at Victoria Park, be prepared to join her.

She doesn’t take no for an answer.

The diminutive Quebec fiddle-paying dynamo opened Friday’s portion of the festival facing a crowd of little more than 100 people at 6 p.m. Friday.

When she left, there were several hundred cheering, applauding fans and three or four dozen of them dancing, just as Briga’s music commanded.

Briga’s music is something of an oddity, fused with Eastern European, Balkan and Romany rhythms, at times hypnotic and other times soaring with energy.

It’s almost a bit of trickery to the ear when suddenly you hear a familiar Western beat or rhythm ease into the equation.

She played seven songs, backed by a talented band of musicians including Alix Guery on accordion and keyboards, Tacfarinas Kichou on bindir, darbouka, ryk and guellal, Marton Maderspach on drums and tupan and Jeremi Roy on acoustic and electric bass.

Her repertoire includes an Edith Piaf song, Johnny tu ne Ange, she described as an “ode to bi-polar love’ about a woman who is at times depressed about her lover’s infidelities, at times hysterical for him to stay.

It’s a funny song, one that got the crowd moving as Briga climbed down from the stage and ran into the crowd, clapping and dancing and bringing several people to dance in front.

On stage Briga oozes confidence and joy, yet there’s a vulnerability in her music, such as the quirky, funny Roma cover, Duj Duj, which means two-two.

“It’s the story of a man who always orders two drinks at a time and when the bartender asked him why, he said one was for his wife and the other for his mistress,” Briga told the audience.

The singer-songwriter was nominated recently for ‘best album — pushing the boundaries’ at the Canadian Folk Music Awards and best album world music at Quebec’s music industry awards, for her newest release, Turbo Folk Stories.

The daughter of a Quebec woman and Polish immigrant said she used to fall asleep listening to her father play music of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Romania and grew to love it.

She studied classical music and has been performing professionally for about 20 years.

Her last song, called Lela, is “about a friend who I used to go out with and she was very beautiful and I’d be introduced to some guy and he liked her more.”

Once again, Briga headed into the crowd, but this time carrying her fiddle as her bandmates followed with acoustic instruments, playing for the audience, which swelled around her until there were more than 40 dancers.

Friday’s Sunfest started slow as rain sprayed across the city until the clouds gave way in mid-afternoon and the sun came out.

Vendors said business was slow in the early going, but appeared to be picking up as thousands of people descended on the park.

The possibility of rain is in the forecast for Saturday and Sunday, although the sun is also expected to appear each day.

Friday’s headliner at the bandshell was the Italian folk band, Canzionere Grecanico Salentino, who play a style described as “furiously rhythmic and often trance-like associated with a folk dance once said to cure victims of tarantula and snake bites.”

Saturday, the TD Bandshell headliners are the Romanian brass orchestra, Fanfare Ciocarlia, who play Gypsy music, a high-energy, driving sound “different than any other brass band on earth.” They take the stage at 10 p.m.

Sunday, the Ivory Coast’s reggae legend Alpha Blondy & the Solar System take the bandshell stage at 9:30 p.m. for a 90-minute set to close the festival.