The Marseille Festival opens on Saturday with creations full of energy and open to the world to tell young people “that we can dream”. On fifteen places, citadel, theaters, cultural centers, dancers, musicians or actors will give to see and hear the aspirations of the youth of Rio de Janeiro, Kampala, Amiens or Marseille. The Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll, passionate about the “passinho”, a style of dance born in the favelas of Rio, will immerse the spectators in a free zone, “Zona Franca”, where the dancers express the hopes of the disadvantaged young people of Brazil after the transition between Presidents Bolsonaro and Lula.
In the new creation of the French choreographer Éric Mihn Cuong Castaing, Waka, it is a “young shoot” of Ugandan pop, Racheal M, who will come to tell the daily life of the Waka Starz, a group of adolescent musicians and engaged in a deprived area of Kampala whose clips reach hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube or TikToK. Eternal youth”, also proclaims a series of films directed by Christophe Haleb on young dancers, skaters or circus artists in Amiens, Valence or Romans-sur-Isère, films screened at the Cité radieuse du Corbusier and at the Alcazar, the great library from the center of Marseilles. The young Egyptian choreographer Salma Salem will show the resilience of women despite the pressures.
The youth of Marseille, a Mediterranean port city, is not forgotten. In Haircut by Children, the Canadian collective Mammalian Diving Reflex invited the children of the Vincent-Leblanc school to take possession of a hairdressing salon, “Kenze”, near the Old Port: they will manage reception, cut and colors, a message for adults to have more confidence in the creativity of young people.
At the Théâtre de la Sucrière, Marina Gomes, a choreographer herself born in a disadvantaged neighborhood, will give young people from the northern neighborhoods of the city, too often reduced to a single image of violence and drug trafficking, the opportunity to express their energy. and their dreams. Bach Nord, to music inspired by Jean-Sébastien Bach, in reaction to the film BAC Nord, which followed a police brigade, thus wants to “deconstruct clichés” without hiding the violence. “It is not because we are born somewhere and grow up somewhere that we have to pay the bill for life, there are also talents, creativity, an energy to live and grow, including in the northern districts and despite a “difficult” environment: “the festival makes it possible to enhance all of this”, underlines for AFP Marie Didier, to explain the emphasis placed this year on youth. “There is a need to tell them that we trust them and that we can always dream,” she adds.
To be accessible to as many people as possible, the Marseille Festival applies a very low price for tickets (10 euros) and offers reductions of 5 euros to students and under 12s. Places for one euro are also available, in a city where the poverty rate exceeds 50% in certain districts, and a thousand young people will be accompanied to “become familiar with the performing arts” during the festival.
Accessibility which will also involve a lot of work done so that people with disabilities have their place: audio-description or image blowers, people whispering a description in the ear for the visually impaired, vibrating vests to better feel the sensations for the hearing impaired. In a dance conference tinged with humour, the Scottish choreographer Claire Cunningham will tell how she found a new choreographic language with her handicap and her crutches.
