Princess Lalla Hasnaa chaired, Thursday evening in Fez, the opening ceremony of the 26th edition of the Fez Festival of Sacred Music of the World, organized under the High Patronage of King Mohammed VI, around the theme “Architecture and the coronation “.
An opening show, under the theme “Voices and sacred geometries”, which offers a journey from Fez to Jerusalem via Tibet, the Taj Mahal, Notre-Dame Cathedral to end in Casablanca with the Hassan II Mosque.
A hundred artists, sacred songs from Morocco belonging to the three monotheistic religions, the Indian qawwal, the kathak dance which once told the facts of the deities of “sanātanadharma” (eternal law), and the Buddhist poems of Milarepa, all exalt a sacred which has succeeded in surmounting all the crises of Humanity until today.
From the Gothic cathedral to the Hebrew synagogue, from the immaculate marble of Mongolian India to the clay zelliges of the imperial mosques of Morocco, the visible pays homage to the invisible, traces the vertical axes between heaven and earth, the cosmos and nature.
The divine word seems to snuggle up in the nook of the stones, often illuminated by a few patches of light, filtering through stained glass or moucharabieh. The columns promote the elevation of spirits and the relief of chiaroscuro suggests this feeling of returning to the Garden of Eden.
An architectural paradise designed by craftsmen from the guilds who, with their rulers and compasses, brought together right angles, arches, vaults, domes and warheads through a geometry and a partition often subject to divine proportion.
The scenography for this opening night, designed and directed by Alain Weber, gave pride of place to a host of renowned artists, including Françoise Atlan, who is the missing link in a Mediterranean inhabited by this multitude of musical currents, fruits of the most extraordinary migrations, and whose vocal expression is a crossing of Judeo-Arab and Berber history.
It is also about the Spanish company of vertical dance “Delrevés”, which created a poetic language where the gesture becomes as it were sanctified, of the Choir of room of Morocco directed by Amine Hadef, of Lobsang Chonzor (Tibet) embodying on its own the poet, the ascetic and the spiritual master carried by an initiatic legend, and of Kathak Academy and Anuj Arjun Mishra Dance Company (India).
Starting from the hydraulic clock, the Bouinaniyya, which punctuated the time of Fez, voices celebrate the majesty of medieval rose windows such as that of Notre-Dame, known as the “rayed rose” (1250).
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