Amateur arts include all sorts of arts and skills that an amateur artist performs during his spare time.
Hence, most of the amateur artists have their own jobs and don’t take art as a profession.
This is the definition of amateur arts in Morocco, as Mohammed Benjeddi, actor and director from Oujda,
Morocco, told us the very first day of searching for information on amateur arts in Morocco.
We found his theatre group and association on the World Wide Web. During the months that followed,
he told us by bits and pieces all he knew about amateur arts in his country and he gave us the e-mail
addresses of close friends: two directors, a teacher of classic Arab language, a scriptwriter
nd a female professional artist (she told us that she is definitely the only female professional
artist in the region). From them we tried to understand how it is to be an amateur artist in Morocco.
Our questions sometimes were ‘very Dutch’; for example every time when we tried to find out ‘how it is organised’ and ‘who is financing’ and ‘whether any figures are known about the number of people practising’. Most of the time there was no answer to these questions. “Yes, there is a lot of amateur art in Morocco; no, we don’t know how much”. Everyone we talked to was very sure that there is no such thing as a governmental policy on amateur arts.
The arts, including amateur arts, have strong links with tradition and the Islamic religion. Rituals and celebrations play an important role. Handicrafts are very well developed, there are many people nowadays who are very skilled in weaving, ceramics, tanning and the making of mosaics, but they don’t call themselves amateur artists.
Adil Semmar, film critic and journalist, director of MaghrebArts magazine - we got in contact by the internet too - told us that the difference between professional and amateur artists in Morocco is not very clear. Most professional artists don’t earn enough money to make a good living, so they need to have another job next to their profession. If the definition of an amateur artist is “someone making art in his spare time”, then that definition also includes these professional artists.
Amateur artists or amateur groups in Morocco don’t receive any subsidies; they pay themselves for everything they make or produce. Sometimes, and that is the case with handicrafts, professional artists can get a state subsidy.
The Ministry of Youth and Sport supervises amateur arts in Morocco. Youth centres are built and managed by this ministry and all the different amateur associations are part of it. There are more than 162 amateur theatre groups supervised by the Moroccan Federation of Amateur Theatre (FNTA: Féderation Nationale de Théâtre en Amateur) which itself belongs to the Ministry of Youth and Sport. The FNTA only supervises theatre. Other federations and organisations are responsible for music and other disciplines. In order to find out more about the quantitative side of arts, e.g. the number of persons involving in amateur arts, Mohammed referred us to the Ministry of Culture, so we wrote to the Ministry of Youth and Sport and to the Ministry of Culture. They never answered.
‘In our association AFMIK (Alliance Franco-Marocaine Ibn Khaldoun) there are more than 200 participants’, Mohammed told us. ‘AFMIK, where our troupe, La Voile, works, was established according to the law of 1958 concerning associations in Morocco. In our troupe most of the comedians and the artists belong to the Ministry of Education, in other words, they are all teachers. Our troupe organises many different activities such as theatre, artistic workshops, cinema centre, artistic dance and workshops on singing. Nevertheless, theatre is the cornerstone in our association. It is given a lot of importance. I am the president of the association. I write most of the plays performed by this troupe and I am the stage director. I also supervise workshops for young members’.
