Rabat Rising

As magical experiences go, sitting in the Chellah – a medieval, Unesco-listed Merenid necropolis in Morocco’s capital Rabat – watching contemporary dance master Shahrock Moshkin Ghalam playfully pirouette takes some beating. The last rays of sunlight bathe him in a golden glow and beautifully back light virtuoso tar player Aïda Nosrat, kanoun player Christine Zayed and percussionist Saghar Khadem, who play while he dances.

The performance was one of nearly a hundred at the 2019 edition of Mawazine, the world’s largest and most diverse music festival attracting 2.75 million people. Since 2001, it has been organized by the Association Maroc Cultures under the high patronage of King Mohamed VI himself. Vast laser-lit international concerts, intimate dance recitals, street performances and creative workshops take place across seven stages, in local neighbourhoods and at heritage sites like the Chellah. 

Marwane Fachane, CEO of the city’s top cultural agency the Hiba Foundation, says, “there is an institutional vision for Rabat to be Morocco’s window to the world, which is why culture is now central to the city’s development.”It’s also why Rabat was nominated Africa’s Capital of Culture in 2022. Mawazine is just the biggest in a long list of cultural events that fill the city’s calendar including the Roots Film Festival, the Rabat Book Fair, an internationally acclaimed art Biennale and the Jidar Street Art Festival.

The Hiba Foundation supports many of these initiatives with a mandate to foster Moroccan talent across all the arts. Their three-storey heritage home on Avenue Mohammed V includes a one-of-a-kind theatre-cinema auditorium, dance studios, workshop spaces and a café which hosts a packed weekly programme of jam, stand-up, improv, slam, book readings and concerts. Yet still Rabat flies beneath the world’s cultural radar.

That’s set to change with the opening of the late Zaha Hadid’s Grand Theatre. Set in a curve of the Bouregreg River it looks like a faceted pebble sculpted by the river’s flow over millennia. It is the Pritzker Prize-winning architect at her best, a stunningly original and artful building. “Zaha had close personal ties to Morocco,” says Nils Fischer, ZHA’s Director of the project since Zaha’s passing. “Seeing this building completed as the office’s first project on the continent and one that Zaha was personally involved in will be an important milestone for us.”

“The theatre is a symbolic ‘island’ and meeting place between Rabat and its twin-city Salé,” Fischer explains. “Its emphasis is catering to a local audience, whilst the ambition behind the brief is to do so in a facility of world-class quality that is able to extend its reach to both international artists and visitors, and to make no compromise when it comes to offering the best possible environment for artistic excellence.”

Light, an essential principle of Islamic design, is also key to the Grand Theatre and is similarly central to King Mohammed VI’s renaissance plan for Rabat to be a ‘City of Lights’. At the inauguration of the new National Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2022, the monarch illuminated further: “Culture is not just a reflection of creativity…it provides sustenance for the soul and the intellect; it links the past with the present. Culture is a bond between the individual and his or her community”.

“Rabat has always been a vibrant city with a rich and young intellectual and artistic scene,” says Moroccan-Iraqi filmmaker and Zaha’s niece, Tala Hadid, “but it has undergone a profound and organised transformation over the last few years. For example, there has been serious architectural renovation of ancient sites such as the Kasbah of the Oudayas. And, at the same time, new cultural spaces and initiatives are being supported to give lieu to contemporary cultural production.”

This includes the opening of the superb Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2014, which launched the Rabat Biennale in 2019. The inaugural show featured a radical roster of female-only artists, among them leading pan-Arab lights like Mona Hatoum, Ghada Amer, Diana Al-Hadid and Ikram Kabbaj.

And, there’s still so much to come. The US$3.5 billion Wessal Bouregreg masterplan, overseen by Atkins Global, has already seen the addition of an upgraded marina, a new tramway, high-speed train link and bridge. Further development includes a House of Arts & Culture, a Library of National Archives as well as new neighbourhoods of modernist villas, fountain-filled parks, luxurious riverside housing and high-end retail. In 2022, the plush new Fairmont La Marina opened at the mouth of the river overlooking Salé’s beaches and the Kasbah of the Oudayas.

“The vision for Rabat is far-reaching,” says Hadid, “and it’s exciting to envisage all the possibilities of Rabat becoming an important cultural pole on the African continent.” Across the river from her aunt’s Grand Theatre the finishing touches are being put to the 250-metre-high Mohammed VI Tower. Funded by billionaire businessman and co-founder of BMCE Bank, Othman Benjelloun, it looks like a rocket on a launch pad - a metaphorical missile to the future.