This festival aims primarily to showcase young talents and new musical technologies. It is a festival whose horizon is the future. The theme of this edition is: Future Perfects.
A desire to blend the future and the past, yesterday and tomorrow. The Mozarts of tomorrow might be here, hence a multiplicity of research fields and quests for new talents. The guest of honor in 2014 is China on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Franco-Chinese relations.
What is music, if not writing words with sounds. Listening to the murmur of music, sounds, and words. Villa Arson will host the festival by echoing visual arts with sound art.
The MANCA is also an opportunity for creations with choreographies. We travel through space and time with this festival, listening more than feeling the wind and the Meltem at the chantier du sang neuf (109!), a new partner of this festival and from Greece to China, the traveler’s ticket and visa is music. Did we mention time? The Middle Ages become, through the magic of musicians, contemporary.
China brings us its musical traditions and in a well-suited exchange discovers our musical technologies. The Manca festival cannot be summed up; how could we summarize its multiple purposes? Creation, innovation, transmission of knowledge, emotion, sharing, and pairing with other cities, other countries, and other cultures.
This year, China and for the first time, soloists from Shanghai on the stage of the Nice opera. The theme “Future Perfects” in plural will captivate grammarians and remind some of us of primary school lessons when we still learned something. The MANCA 2014 thus serves as a link between the past and the future, with the present being the bridge between yesterday and tomorrow.
The future perfect being the affirmation in the present of what will be done soon, and naturally the MANCA is the expression of this tense in conjugations, the torment of schoolchildren of yesteryear. Already the 35th edition! A now well-oiled, well-prepared festival, but one that does not rest on its laurels and maintains the quality and also the quantity of its programming for the greatest pleasure of the festival-goers, a festival whose rule can be summed up in one word: Culture.
Thierry Jan
