From November 1st-3rd, the Moroccan city of Essaouira will host a festival featuring Andalusian music – a blend of Flamenco, traditional singing of Grenada and instrumental music – with participation from artists from both sides of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
Through the use of lyrics that incorporate Arabic, Hebrew, Moroccan spoken dialect and Spanish over ancient Andalusian melodies, the festival's organizers aim to send a message for cultural exchange and peaceful co-existence.
Essaouira Association President André Azoulay said, "This is an invitation to recall the joint memory which we seem to have lost; an invitation to recover that golden age of co-existence and the building of joint civilization and culture; an invitation to dance together and to give a different picture other than the catastrophic image conveyed daily by the media about Jewish-Arab relations."
Alongside the festival, a plastic arts exhibition will be featured, offering works from 15 Moroccan artists focusing on the themes of co-existence and cultural intermingling. Azoulay said the exhibited works represent Moroccan artists' response to the "clash of civilizations" theory he views as a politically-motivated fraud.
More art will be displayed under the title "Faces from Jewish and Arab Music". These works will take visitors on a historical journey beginning with paintings by Eugéne Delacroix from his stay in Tangier (1847), when he called in prominent Jewish musicians of the day to portray them on canvas; through photographs from the late 19th century and early 20th century; and ending with the icons of the Oriental New Wave on the Internet.
The festival will also honour the late Moroccan artist Abdessadek Cheqara (1931-1998), who is considered one of the leading figures in preserving Andalusian heritage in Morocco.
One of the most prominent participants in the festival will be Rabbi Haim Louk, head of the Moroccan-Jewish community "Em Habanim", currently based in Los Angeles. He possesses a melodious voice, and is considered one of the rare scholars of joint Arab-Hebrew musical heritage, especially the arts of "piyut" and "mtroj" in which Arabic and Hebrew words are blended in song.
Also participating in the festival will be Algerian musician Maurice El Mediouni, Moroccan artist Mohamed Ben Omar Ziani, Moroccan singer Hayat Boukhriss, and a band led by Mohamed Amin El Akrami, a teacher of Andalusian music in Tetouan, as well as singer Samira Kadiri, accompanied by the band ARABISC.
From the other side of the Mediterranean, Spanish Flamenco singer Juan Peña Fernández, who is also known as "El Lebrijano" after his birthplace of Lebrija, and Flamenco star Estrella Morrente will also take part.
During the festival, an intellectual forum on the joint Arab-Jewish heritage will be organised with the participation of researchers and artists from the Maghreb, Europe and the United States.
"We are noticing an increasing interest across the world in the joint Arab-Jewish heritage; a trend towards the restoration of memory and the recovery of joint identity," Azoulay said. "The most important issue to be presented for discussion during the intellectual forum is to know whether this trend is just nostalgia or whether it actually expresses something stronger."
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