Intercultural Storytelling Performance in Morocco and the United States

Abstract

The Ben M'Sik neighborhood surrounding Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco, is the largest and poorest of the region's six districts. In 2009, a group of American performance studies faculty and students partnered with faculty and students at Hassan II Ben M'sik University in Casablanca to participate in workshops focused on oral traditions and storytelling, emphasizing active listening, performance, and dialogic encounters. This paper uses excerpts from ethnographic texts generated by our American students to consider their predispositions, attitudes, and discoveries during the trip; the challenges we encountered while fostering dialogic experiences and performances; happy surprises; and generative frictions that transpired.

Notes

1. “Helen” was an American undergraduate participant. The American and Moroccan students’ actual names have been changed to pseudonyms.

2. This adaptation was originally created and co-directed by Dr. John Gentile, chair of KSU's Department of Theatre and Performances Studies in 2008; he and co-director Henry Scott then revised it as a 70-minute version expressly for the International Festival of University Theatre, Casablanca.

3. We later learned that that other Casablancans referred to Ben M'sik inhabitants with the local expression as “04” or “zero quatre” people—this phrase, absorbed into the rhetoric and lexicon of everyday speech, implies that these citizens are less than “whole” people. When asked, one local said, “When you tell somebody you are a ‘04,’ he immediately goes away because he knows he is in danger. People in Casa are afraid of 04 people” (Abderrahim qtd. in El Azhar, “BMCM” 4).

4. Geographically positioned at a liminal crossroads, Casablanca shares its part in the country's history as a trade- and transit-hub linking the West, the Middle East, and Africa. Comprised of native Amazigh and immigrant Arab, “Sudanese” (a colloquialism in Moroccan dialogue and Gnawa music for “black Africa/ns”), and Western heritages, the country gained its independence from France in 1956.

5. This could very well have only been our perception, generated from the way the students spoke about their homes and their eagerness to introduce us to Casablanca's various sights.

6. In Marrakech, this student did wander off on her own to take pictures and explore the markets, but not with the Disney results she perhaps had anticipated. She purchased a decorative dagger, which she put in her bag. As she passed a Moroccan woman in the tight, narrow streets, the end of the dagger began to poke out from her bag and caught the woman's blouse, tearing it as she passed. The woman began to shout at Brooke in Arabic, demanding payment for the damage her dagger had caused. Brooke yelled back, and a crowd formed. Alone and the center of spectacle, Brooke got away as best she could from the situation and then began looking for the rest of the group. It took her 30–45 minutes before she found us, and she described the incident with tears welling up in her eyes.

7. Later, however, Helen assumed the role of mentee when she expressed her gratitude for her partner's “patience with my [cultural] ignorance” and vowed to “adopt that practice and take it back home with me.”

8. One wonders in what ways he figures Moroccans as not being “free.”

9. To begin the next part of the workshop, we led students in a guided fantasy through one of their own memories—taking them first to the people and relationships present in that memory, and then to the place itself and details about that location and context. As Helen relaxed into the slower rhythm of the re-membering and relationship-building process, she shared these thoughts about her experience of this exercise: We did an exercise during the workshop where we were asked to close our eyes and think of a significant memory. Something really weird happened to me during this, like I disappeared into this other realm of thought. When asked to think of this most meaningful memory, I seemed to be watching a TV that was split-screen, on one half I saw my little brother, Ethan, being born, on the other half: my great Uncle Bob's funeral. Life + death side by side. What a haunting moment … (Scott)

10. Workshop III began with warm-ups derived from the developing relationships between the students. Several of the American students had, over the course of developing the performance of Moby-Dick with their director, experimented with stomping and clapping rhythms. These students, in their off-times with the Moroccan students, had begun to play with developing similar rhythms together. Students warmed up by first passing clap rhythms around in a circle, and then began to “freestyle” clapping and stomping rhythms, beating on chairs and tables. As they freestyled, Hannah directed them to increase or decrease the intensity of the rhythms, ending the clapping at a high-energy point.

11. These folktales, in speaking through time-tested metaphors and cultural signifiers, perhaps functioned as what Parker Palmer dubs “third things” which, placed at the center of attention became an “independent voice,” “speak[ing] for itself” and liberating the performances from self-absorption and realistic embodiment (Palmer 118).

12. The crux of these story-sharing moments—beyond the word-by-word content or concern with factual or historical accuracy—dwelled in the embodied experience of sharing these stories one to another; the visceral, emotional reaction of being in the live presence of one another.

13. We use Victor Turner's definition of communitas, as “the moment when compatible people—friends, congeners—obtain a flash of lucid mutual understanding on the existential level, when they feel that all problems could be resolved” (47–48).

14. A testament to the impact of the 2009 oral history workshop shared by KSU and FLSHB students is the fact that three of the Moroccan students were inspired to be members of the Ben M'sik team. One of them stated on his postworkshop survey: “Sharing our stories with our American partners was very enriching in the sense that each participant gained a better understanding of the other culture and hence respects and appreciates its values and traditions. […] My growing interest in performance ethnography leads me to volunteer for Casablanca–Kennesaw Project” (Saidi qtd. in Dickey and Lewis 23).

15. The website address for this online exhibit is: http://marb.kennesaw.edu/identities.

16. In fact, Hassan II Ben M'sik University has begun work on launching the first public School of the Arts in Morocco, a move that will increase opportunities for collaboration between Hassan II Ben M'sik and KSU's College of the Arts. Several leaders from FLSHB in Morocco will visit KSU's College of the Arts in fall 2012. During that visit faculty and administrators from both universities will discuss best practices in the creation and evolution of an arts school.