Her Royal Highness Princess Lalla Hasnaa chaired, Thursday evening in Fez, the opening ceremony of the 26th edition of the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music, organized under the High Patronage by HM King Mohammed VI on the theme “Architecture and the sacred”.
Upon her arrival at the historic “Bab Makina” square, HRH Princess Lalla Hasnaa reviewed a section of the Auxiliary Forces which paid the honors, before being greeted by the minister of Youth, Culture and Communication, Mohamed Mehdi Bensaid, the Wali of the Fez-Meknes region, governor of the prefecture of Fez, Essaid Zniber, the first deputy-president of the Council of the Fez-Meknes region, Youness Er-rafik, and the president of the Municipal Council of Fez, Abdeslam Bekkali.
Her Royal Highness was also greeted by the President of the Municipal Council Al Mechouar-Fez Jdid, Issam Filali Hammouz, and the President of the “Spirit of Fez” Foundation, Abderrafia Zouitene.
Afterwards, HRH Princess Lalla Hasnaa joined the official platform where Her Royal Highness watched the opening concert of this edition (June 9-12), which featured musicians from different backgrounds, initiating a travel through music and pictures projected on the secular walls of Bab Makina, through the five great religions of the world: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism.
The opening show, under the theme “Voices and sacred geometries”, is a journey from Fez to Jerusalem via Tibet, the Taj Mahal, the Cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris before ending in Casablanca at the Hassan II Mosque.
A hundred artists, sacred songs from Morocco belonging to the three monotheistic religions, the Indian Qawwali, the kathak dance and the Buddhist poems of Milarepa, all exalt a sacred which has succeeded in overcoming 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 tribute to the invisible, outlines the vertical axes between heaven and earth, the cosmos and nature.
The scenography of this opening night, designed and directed by Alain Weber, featured several renowned artists, including Françoise Atlan, who is the missing link in a Mediterranean inhabited by this multitude of musical currents, which are the result of the most extraordinary migrations, and whose vocal expression is a crossing of a Judeo-Arab and Berber history, and Spanish band of vertical dance “Delrevés”, Lobsang Chonzor (Tibet) and Anuj Arjun Mishra Dance Company (India).
At the end of this inaugural concert, HRH Princess Lalla Hasnaa was greeted by members of the artistic creation team of the opening show.
