Carried by the Living Arts Foundation, the International Theater Festival of Casablanca (FITC) celebrates its twenty years of theatrical activism while honoring Tunisia, a star guest, and the power of a Maghrebian scene which has nothing to prove. Between the RAM, raw commitment and aesthetic daring, this meeting stands out as an incandescent crossroads where the theater becomes what has never been so alive.
This year, FITC deploys a program that knocks hard and mild. Twelve shows, in Arabic and French, will invest four emblematic scenes from the city – Living Arts Studio, Mohammed VI Theater, Anfa Cultural Complex and Mohamed Zefzaf Theater.
Of Heavenly dancespiritual quest for Tunisian Taher Issa Ben Larbi, FawdaMariam Zaimi’s social stroke on collective responsibility, passing by The grapes of angera raging reinterpretation of Steinbeck’s classic by Xavier Simonin, the selection makes aesthetics and fights dialogue.
We will also come across Arrival by plane of Amine Boudrika, who weaves the exile of a Moroccan woman between two banks, or The doll of Monsieur Kdelicate wink to Kafka in the face of loss. Without forgetting Toxic Paradise of Sadak Trabelsi, Tunisian fable raw on a city stuck in its mirages, or Adnasswhich dissects the symbolic violence inflicted on women. A theater that is not content to entertain: he shakes up, he questions, he repairs.
The theater rises on its big acts
By posing Tunisia as a guest of honor, the festival celebrates a theatrical scene that combines poetry, memory and resistance. Creations like Heavenly dance or Toxic Paradise embody this vitality, while figures like Mouna Noureddine, Tunisian icon, radiate alongside the Moroccans Elhachmi Benamar and Souad Khouyi, greeted for their legacy at the Maghreb theater.
Since 2004, the foundation of living arts, carried by the vision of Noureddine Ayouch, has been much more than a festival: a laboratory of ideas, a refuge for the imagination, a space of emancipation. “”Theater is a place of listening and social transformation», Harts Ayouch. Adil Madih, director of the festival, drives the point home: “We want scenes from the South that speak to each other, new voices that pierce, a theatrical culture that pulses with its time». Twenty years later, the promise is held: the festival has given Moroccan theater its letters of nobility, while opening up to the world, from Avignon to Carthage.
Beyond the boards, the FITC becomes a school and agora. Masterclasses with Moroccan and international sizes, workshops for the next generation, conferences on aesthetic and political issues: everything is thought to circulate speech. Shows like Rihla Jawiyaplea for animal life, or Ah w Bardat by Mahmoud Echahdi, prove that the Moroccan scene knows how to combine heritage and modernity. And with creations like In your skin From Julie Ménard, the festival is betting on emergence, audacity, the future.
In Casablanca, in May, the theater is not a luxury, it is a necessity. An art that looks at the world opposite, which celebrates bridges between banks, generations, struggles. Twenty years later, FITC remains this rare space where we laugh, where we cry, where we think. Where we simply live. So go to Casa: the scene is yours.
