There is a quality of attention that only live storytelling produces — a collective stillness, half-breath, half-surrender, that no screen can replicate. On Thursday 8 October at 18:30, the Salle Juliette Gréco in Carros will hold that kind of quiet, as two performers invite an audience into the oral tradition of the Maghreb.
The venue sits at 5 bis boulevard de la Colle Belle, in the hilltop village of Carros — a medieval perch above the Var valley, roughly twenty minutes inland from Nice. Entry is free, and no reservation is required.
The Storytellers and Their Instruments
Fatiha Sadek and Abd Chakûr are the architects of the evening. Their programme, Contes Méditerranéens, draws on the deep reservoir of North African oral literature: tales threaded with wisdom, mischief, and the genuinely fantastical. What distinguishes their approach is the marriage of narrative and sound. Each story arrives accompanied by a specific instrument — the ney, the oud, the tambour, the bendir — so that the music does not merely decorate the telling but flavours it, the way a spice changes the character of a dish rather than simply adding to it.
The ney is a rim-blown flute of ancient lineage, its breathy, searching tone used across the Middle East and North Africa for centuries in both sacred and secular contexts. The oud, the fretless lute that predates the European guitar by a millennium, carries a harmonic richness that seems to compress distance and time. The tambour and bendir — frame drums of varying weight and resonance — provide the rhythmic ground on which the stories walk. Together these four instruments constitute a sound world that is immediately recognisable and yet, for many Western European ears, still capable of surprise.
Tales That Travel
The Maghrebi storytelling tradition is not a museum piece. It is a living practice with roots in the halqa — the circle of listeners that once formed spontaneously in the medinas of Marrakech, Tunis, or Algiers around a gifted hlaïqi, a public narrator who commanded attention through voice, gesture, and the architecture of suspense. The tales themselves move between registers: a story might begin with a proverb, turn into comedy, and arrive at something close to the sacred, all within a few minutes.
Sadek and Chakûr describe their programme as a journey through 'wisdom, mischief, and the fantastic' — three temperatures that Maghrebi oral literature holds simultaneously without contradiction. The stories, they say, distil 'a memory, a nostalgia, a subtle joy, carried on the gentle air of the marvellous.' That last phrase is not mere poetry: the merveilleux in North African narrative is a technical register, a mode in which the impossible is presented with the same matter-of-fact tone as the everyday, and the audience is invited to hold both without choosing.
For a visitor to the Côte d'Azur, this kind of evening offers something the coastline's more celebrated pleasures do not: interiority, slowness, the specific pleasure of being told something in a room with strangers.
What to Expect
The Salle Juliette Gréco — named for the French singer and actress whose career spanned existentialism and chanson — is a modest cultural hall suited to intimate performance. Arriving early is advisable not because places are limited by ticket but because the atmosphere of such evenings is shaped by the room filling gradually, conversations in the foyer, the particular anticipation of a performance that asks you to listen rather than watch.
The programme is presented in partnership with Cinealma and the Boussougou collective, organisations associated with Mediterranean cultural exchange in the region. The evening is conducted in French.
Carros itself rewards the journey. The old village, distinct from the industrial zone below, retains its Provençal character: narrow lanes, a castle that has overlooked the Var since the twelfth century, and the kind of late-afternoon light in October that makes even a short walk feel considered. An evening performance here has a different texture from anything along the coast — quieter, more local, less performed for visitors.
'Chaque histoire se teinte d'une saveur, d'un goût, d'un instrument particulier, pour raconter un secret enfoui dans les cœurs.' — Fatiha Sadek et Abd Chakûr
The Mediterranean has always been a sea of stories exchanged across its shores — Berber, Arab, Andalusian, Provençal — and this one evening in a village hall above the Var is, in its modest way, a continuation of that very long conversation. Go, listen, and let the ney do the rest.