Wednesday, June 26, 2024 at 10:41
Rabat – The Gnaoua and World Music Festival of Essaouira, which will complete its first quarter of a century this year, is preparing to celebrate 25 years of a unique artistic and human epic, underlined the director and producer of this festival, Neila Tazi.
This festival like no other has, from the start, gone beyond simple entertainment and had strong repercussions, allowing an ancestral art to be reborn and reinvented, indicated Ms. Tazi in the editorial of this 25th edition.
This outstanding artistic event provided proof that development through culture was possible, by contributing to the growth of the Essaouira destination, which it placed on the map of world capitals of music, and became the one of the main emblems of Moroccan and African culture internationally, she maintained.
For this 25th edition, she noted that the Festival has put together a highly qualitative program. “More than 400 artists will ignite the stages of the Festival during 3 days of gigantic celebration in the medina and on the beach of Essaouira. Like every year, the Maâlems Gnaoua and their musical guests from the four corners of the planet will create new fusions, which have become the trademark of the Festival,” she said.
On the other hand, Ms. Tazi stressed that as part of its support for the new generation of musicians from Morocco, the African continent and elsewhere, the Festival has launched a new training program with one of the most prestigious musical institutions in the world, Berklee College of Music, headquartered in Boston, United States.
This partnership, which is the result of several years of discussion with this prestigious musical institution, is proof of the seriousness and credibility enjoyed by the Festival internationally and the start of a collaboration that we hope will be long and which will allow bring out new talents, she explained.
She also mentioned the creation of a university chair dedicated to Gnaoua culture within the “Center for African Studies” of the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University of Benguerir (UM6P).
The objective of this chair, which will see the light of day in 2025, is to create a research space with a view to deepening knowledge of Gnaoua culture, its origins and its meaning, she concluded.
For this year, the programming aims to be avant-garde, daring, harmonious and inclusive. This is a wonderful invitation to live a unique experience, which only the Gnaoua and World Music Festival can imagine.
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