Marrakesh, Morrocco

My hotel in Marrakesh was an ancient three storied mud colored building with an open center courtyard lined with balconies. The residents cooked their dinners, sometimes communally, in flat clay cooking pots over wood or charcoal fires on the balconies. Everybody ate out of the cooking pot dipping with bread and fingers. There was only one dish to clean. On the roof one could see similar beautiful clay buildings filling up the city, cut through by alleys barely wide enough for two donkeys to pass. There is no alcohol in the walled city of Marrakesh and almost no cars or modern buildings.

The Medina there is one of the most famous markets in Africa or the world with an endless maze of stalls selling everything. They invite you in for fresh peppermint tea and than give you the hard sell. The first time I went in it took me all day to find my way home again.

In front of the the Medina is the Place Djaam El Fnaa. In the the evening the square is packed with musicians, acrobats, snake charmers,orange juice stands and crowds of people. But I was much too awed by the whole city to juggle there. After three days of looking around I walked well out out of the walled city and found an empty lot to juggle in. After a while I was surrounded by a small crowd of onlookers, mostly in wheelchairs. They brought me to their home for polio youth. For the rest of my time in Marrakesh I would go everyday to eat lunch with and entertain the people there. There was an American Peace Corps woman there who could translate for me what the staff and youth were saying.

After a few more days I tried juggling at the Place Djaam el Fnaal. After 30 seconds there were 200 people pressing in on me for a closer view. I was just ineffectually trying to get them to move back to give me enough room to juggle when an old man in a djelabi grabbed me by the the elbow and pulled me away, jabbering at me I don’t know what. I thought he was going to take me to the police but it turned out that he was the grandfather of an acrobatic troop they wanted me to perform with them.

So every evening from than on I was in the acrobats show. There were six of them and me. The grandfather was the lead musician and a talker. The father was an acrobat, clown, musician and head talker. The son, 12 years old?, performed the contortion routine that was the finale. None of them spoke a word of French and I never learned hardly a word of Arabic. They were the king act of the square and we would perform each evening one two and a half hour show ending at sunset.

They wanted me to keep my juggling short and sweet. They would pass the hat and ask for money endlessly before and after. I was always accompanied by four live musicians. The constant solicitation for money and every single coin dropped in the hat required praise to Allah above. But I realized after repeated watchings that some times they were mocking the prayers for humor’s sake. Somebody would throw in a penny and they would cry up something like”piss off God, is that the best you can do?” and the crowd would laugh.

Just a few weeks earlier I had watched every night of the Internationale Festivale de Cirque de Demain in Paris and seen several similar contortion acts. A typical finale was doing a slow motion back bend to snatch a rose lying behind your heels in your teeth. This Moroccan kid had the same acrobatic stand, except it looked like it had spent 25 years knocking around the Sahara, and he did the same finale except he would do his slow motion back bend to pick up a glass of coca cola from 10 inches below his heels and than drink it as he brought it up in slow motion. Before the finale they would always do a comedy bit praying repeatedly to the coca cola prostrated on the ground. Than they would spill the coca-cola and run around screaming in agony, sure that they had offended god to the upmost before finally sending someone to run to the store for another bottle of Coke.

The front couple of rows seated in the dirt was always children and cripples. There was always plenty of wheelchairs and people short a limb or two in the front row. In Europe and America when you street perform you are always asking people to please come in closer and make a proper crowd but in Morocco they always want to crowd in too close. The father had a simple solution for pushing them back. Two or three times a show he would walk around the circle with a stick, whipping on everybody in front. A few kids would always break out crying and the adults standing in back would howl in laughter. From this I picked up my habit continued until today of hitting audience members on the head with my clubs while I juggle.

Every evening after the show we would repair to a cafe and carefully divide up our money into seven equal shares. I made 10$ plus a day which at the time was enough to live, staying at my hotel and eating at restaurants. They were headed off soon to the camel markets of the Sahara, south of the mountains soon and invited me to go along. ( I should have accepted, huh?) But I went my tourist way instead. I hiked into the high Atlas and threw myself into Carnival in the Canary Islands. When I came back to Marrakesh 6 weeks later the acrobatic troop was gone.

My influence on the Place Djaam El Fnaal performing scene.

My first time in Marrakesh there has been two brothers who performed a clown show. One had a telephone book tied around one hip and the other one would whack him on the telephone book with a stick. For 30 minutes the action would stop and start but never otherwise change. I could never understand a word of their comic dialogue but it sometimes made the audience howl with laughter. When I came back six weeks later these same two brothers were doing a juggling act. Of course they were not great yet but they juggled balls, homemade clubs, rings and knives.and they had a good crowd. While one brother was performing the other one spotted me in the audience with clubs sticking out of my knapsack. He grabbed me by the elbow, held me firmly and walked me 400 meters away before turning to go back to his show.