IL DENARO
10/05/2006
Bennato opens
7th European Culture Festival
The
Euro-Mediterranean Concert for Dialogue Between
Cultures, written by Italian musician Eugenio Bennato and organised by the Mediterraneo Foundation in Naples, will open the 7th European Culture Festival in Algiers. The culture
festival will present more than 30 events and will travel around Algeria until
the end of the month. Many events will also be presented in Oran,
western Algeria, and in Annaba, Tizi
Ouzou and Bejaia, all in
eastern Algeria.
Organised by the Delegation of the European Commission in Algeria and the
cultural services of the EU members, the festival has confirmed itself in the
past few years as one of the most popular events among the Algerian public with
an audience of more than 15,000 during the last edition. "The Maghreb area and Algeria
in particular are not Africa but the Mediterranean.
I have always worked for a Mediterranean 'collectiveness' and hope that this
year's festival can contribute to this togetherness in which mentality, music
and culture are so close," said the chief of the Delegation of the
European Commission in Algeria Lucio Guerrato presenting the rich and multi-format programme of
this year's festival. "Music shows how is it possible to draw together the
traditions and cultures of the Mediterranean countries and allows us to pull
down that screen of suspicion and incomprehension which is mainly
ignorance," Fondazione Mediterraneo president Michele Capasso said about Bennatòs concert in Algiers, which arrives in the Algerian
capital after stages in Cairo, Otranto, Luxembourg,
Rome, Cosenza, Barcelona, Naples and Lecce. The programme of the festival includes events from
13 EU countries and comprises two concerts of popular music and dances, five
concerts of popular folk music, four concerts of classic music, four jazz
evenings, two exhibitions and a children's show by Clowns Sans Frontiers. A
special event presented by the Czech
Republic will be the
feature of the 7th edition of the festival - a theatre performance for the
deaf-mute entirely translated in sign language. As in the previous editions,
the festival will end with a big concert in the open for the
young people who can dance this year to the rhythm of Franco-Algerian.