Under the sign “Culture for all”, and in the framework of the continuity of its professional training dedicated to street arts, the Nomadic Theatre organises the second Euro-Mediterranean Artistic Meeting under its big top in Sidi Moumen. From April 23 to May 2, 2014, the big top of the Nomadic Theatre will therefore welcome the second Euro-Mediterranean Artistic Meeting which will bring together the team of the Nomadic Theatre, young people from the Sidi Moumen district, the French company Rara Woulib, and Moroccan artists. The project “The Euro-Mediterranean Artistic Meetings”, supported and financed by the Anna Lindh Foundation, is a mechanism for accompaniment to creation and artistic mentoring which aims to encourage the transfer of know-how, the sharing of experience, transnational cooperation, and intercultural dialogue. The participants in these meetings will benefit from four modules of accompaniment to creation supervised by a reference artist and two intervening artists from the Rara Woulib collective. Three modules take place in Casablanca, and one module in Marseille in France, resulting in a final creation that brings the two European and Maghreb cultures closer together. The different modules will focus on show engineering in public spaces, staging, spatialisation, the discipline of aerial circus, as well as music.

The action will take place in the big top of the Nomadic Theatre installed in the Sidi Moumen commune, and will also involve young people from the district, thus favouring meeting, exchange, and sharing. The meeting falls within the framework of the continuous professionalisation of the team and apprentices of the Nomadic Theatre in the field of street arts. The Nomadic Theatre already inaugurated in March, in the Sidi Moumen district, the “Itinerant Cultural Workshop”. These workshops are supervised by eight professional trainers and the association has all the necessary insurance to carry out its activities.

The children pass progressively from one workshop to another with the objective of a final parade. They learn to make their masks, to manipulate them (theatrical play workshop), then they practice on stilts and finish their journey with the manufacturing of costumes. Their work results in a major popular festival that will take place in the heart of the district at the end of the school year. The Nomadic Theatre proposes to the beneficiaries of the workshops a work theme that becomes the common thread of the cultural workshops offered to the population, and of the final show (the stork in 2009, plastic in 2010, the candle in 2011, the horse in 2012). The theme is inspired by the social realities of the place of residence. For this next workshop in Sidi Moumen, the organising team aims to have a total of 250 young people participate.

The “Itinerant Cultural Workshops” project is financed by the Drosos Foundation with the support of the INDH since 2008.

Hundreds of young people from the different popular districts of Salé have already benefited from the workshops. In Sidi Moumen, the cultural workshops of the Nomadic Theatre intervene on a site of the Mourafiq social accompaniment programme of the Alliances Foundation.

About the Nomadic Theatre: The cultural association Nomadic Theatre was created in 2006 by Mohammed El Hassouni and Soufia El Boukhari.

The association works in itinerancy, as close as possible to vulnerable populations. It installs its “Itinerant Cultural Workshop”

(El Khayma) for a “residency” of one year in communes and districts not having cultural infrastructure. The objective is to go to meet vulnerable populations and notably excluded young people by proposing artistic activities to them.

The association thus acts as an itinerant cultural public service at the disposal of the communes that wish it.

Since its creation, the association has worked in different districts of Salé between 2006 and 2011 (Hay Inbiâat, Maza, Douar Mika), on the commune of Bouknadel (2011-2012) and on the rural commune of Sidi Taibi (2012-2013), and soon in Sidi Moumen. The association targets as a priority young people in a situation of exclusion, women, and disabled people.