During the 1960s, when decolonisation movements were sweeping the world, it was joked that, after achieving independence, a country had to do three things: design a flag, launch an airline and found a film festival. Western Sahara has a flag but no airline and, despite a 35-year struggle, has yet to achieve independence. The closest Western Sahara comes to its own film festival is the Sahara International Film Festival (known as FiSahara), the world's most remote film festival, whose eighth edition took place this month in a refugee camp deep in the Algerian desert.

If you’re looking for a surprising and off-the-wall show this school holidays, I’ve no hesitation in hugely recommending Chouf Ouchouf, a brilliantly and theatrically inventive acrobat theatre show performed by the Groupe Acrobatique de Tangier, a troupe of Moroccan acrobats who learned their awesome skills on Tangier Beach. Through the wit and imagination of its Swiss theatre directors, the show manages to retain a lively street smell and yet pull off some deft theatrical effects, blurring the edges between normality and strangeness - one moment you feel you might be walking in a souk, the next you’ve been sucked into a darkling, ghostly world of surreal human balancing acts.

Now I know why the BBC Symphony Orchestra slunk so easily into Piazzolla tango mode last Friday: they'd danced it under Latin American instruction four years ago. It's all part of their education department's annual Diverse Orchestras week, where performers from another culture come to open the players' fantasy and the onlookers get to learn something into the bargain. And learning has never been more fun than it was last night in the Tabernacle, Notting Hill's vibrant arts centre, where the Fez Andalusian Orchestra under one of the world's great string players, Mohamed Briouel, set a zinging example.

The interior world of Morocco seems a magical place where music and words have more power than in the disenchanted, cold light of the North. On the plane on my first trip to Fes I met a businessman, in import-export, wearing a Burton suit. The strangeness of Morocco revealed itself when he started telling me of his current problem, that his daughter has been put under a spell by a djinn (he translated the word as “devil”) residing in a frog. His mother was a member of the Hamdashas, sects who are known to cut themselves, and his grandmother, he said, drank boiling water when under trance. Some djinns are believers, are harmless; others, the non-believers (like the one causing trouble to the businessman’s daughter), are the ones that cause lots of trouble.