Undressing the System: The rituals of madness and badness in Moroccan music festivals

Moroccan Festivals are sites of struggle. Festival goers exploit festive drunkenness, musical inebriation and laughter to make up situations of madness (sanity differed and different from itself), irrepressible moments of disorderly rumbling, replete with counter-hegemonic gestures. Indeed, far from being occasions for music and dance only, festivals more often than not correspond to the heated and strained social atmosphere outside them, and intersect with the festival agent’s intention to undress the system through excre-mental performances (those which deploy vulgarity within a discursive plan) , and penetrate through a multiplicity of theatrical gestures of profanity. This paper demonstrates how festivals on occasion grow into terrains for grotesque power relations, chaos, display of transgressive bahavior, and staging of a politically mud-slinging rhetoric of phallic creativity, which, situated within a context of music and art, has to go unpunishable.