Rédaction Africa Links 24 with ALM
Published on 2024-03-04 09:23:29
It will be in its 7th edition this year. The Gnaoua Show Festival for the world will take place from May 8 to 10, 2024 in the city of Marrakech and already promises some great surprises. Here are the details leading up to its organization.
Here is another festival dedicated to the art of Gnaoua. This event has the particularity of being founded by the Hmitti Association for Culture and initiated by the Great Atlas Association of Marrakech (AGA) as well as the Foundation of the “Marrakech Gnaoua Show Festival for the world”. The whole event is organized in partnership with the Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Communication (Department of Culture), in addition to the support of the Marrakech Municipal Council and the Marrakech-Safi Regional Council. While awaiting its organization next May, its creators are highlighting it.
Celebrate an entire art
“To preserve this popular musical genre, the Great Atlas Association has partnered with the Hmitti Association for Culture and Artistic Creation to pool efforts to allow this festival to establish itself among the great festivals, like the Gnaoua Festival in Essaouira. We had the idea to create this festival after the 2019 edition of the National Festival of Popular Arts. We realized the importance of organizing a major festival to celebrate Gnaoua art, an authentic art recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage of humanity,” explains Professor Mohamed Knidiri, president of the Great Atlas Association (AGA). In detail, the Gnaoua Show is intended to better reveal an art with Afro music that breaks down African and other boundaries.
This includes presenting the diversity of its different artistic approaches that characterize the ancestral musical creations present in these varieties of sounds mixing echoes of a distant past and aspirations of the present in a modern and contemporary world. It is a whole journey to discover the influences of ancient slavery, originating from sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, mainly descendants of slaves, gathered in mystical Muslim brotherhoods. Trance plays a very important role that still marks this art whose heritage accumulated over centuries has benefited the flourishing of Gnaoua music, a trigger for the unstoppable renewal of this Afro music and its contemporaneity that continues to promote sensory expression developed in different eras inside as well as outside North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa for centuries. In fact, Gnaoui art weaves through various themes different approaches and multiple mediums, it is the fabric of a universe vibrant with secular “negro spirituals” sounds.
A taste of the program
This 7th edition offers the creations of famous artists, initiated by sweet and symbolic voices from Africa, marked by a creative complicity that nourishes and inspires them. Already, Gnaoua’s work is a deep exploration of the cultural identity of Afro heritage, creating a unique language that reveals a remarkable singularity. Likewise, it offers the opportunity to highlight all this cultural and artistic diversity that characterizes the city of Marrakech. All with a focus on its numerous natural and artistic potentials and thereby creating a cultural, artistic, and socio-economic dynamic, similar to the Marrakech National Festival of Popular Arts (FNAP) open internationally to traditional music and dances from around the world.
The 2024 edition of the Marrakech Gnaoua Show Festival for the world will therefore see the participation of nationally and internationally renowned artists and will be an opportunity to pay tribute to many famous icons of this ancestral art, from here and elsewhere in a universal blend. It will also feature the participation of great Maâlems enjoying strong national notoriety and coming from several regions of the Kingdom with the presence of university professors and researchers. The ochre city alone has its own Gnaoui style that sets it apart from other cities and from generations of Maâlems who have left their mark on this ancient and secular art.
As a reminder, the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of UNESCO, in 2019, inscribed Gnaoua art on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Overall, the Gnaoua Show, as Professor Mohamed Knidiri specifies, “defends the artistic cultural identity of the territory, while contributing to the cultural and tourist influence of Marrakech, as well as promoting the resources of the creative economy.” “Since its creation, it has become a true center of production and support for artists, this festival has been meeting with increasing public success, while offering a festive space for all generations, a meeting place for raising debates during a forum that can create moments of conviviality and sharing,” he adds.
Already, the National Festival of Popular Arts of Marrakech presented for the first time in 1960 the magnificent Afro-Moroccan prowess of Gnaoui dances and music, in the presence of the late King Hassan II, then Crown Prince, and King Hussein of Jordan, in the Harti Gardens.
Read the original article(French) on Aujourdhui.ma
