Myanmar music festivals help to unite youth, heal old wounds and work for a better future
Global non-profit group Turning Tables has staged concerts in troubled countries like Tunisia, Lebanon, and Libya to help young people express themselves creatively. Now Asia is also starting to reap the benefits
However, wherever freedom of expression is threatened or an uprising is underway, that is where Turning Tables goes.
Turning Tables is a global non-profit group that establishes music and film production studios, and stages concerts in areas where young people lack the means to express themselves creatively.
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One of its co-founders is Martin Jakobsen, originally from Copenhagen, Denmark. Turning Tables was born in 2009, when Jakobsen, now 38, was living in Beirut. He was playing in a DJ collective at the time, flying back and forth between Europe and the Middle East to tour.
The collective gigged heavily in Scandinavia, but when Jakobsen attempted to bring the group to Lebanon and approached the cultural arm of the Danish government for financial support, the response was less than encouraging.
“They said, ‘Hell no’,” Jakobsen says in an interview in Yangon, Myanmar, last December during the Voice of the Youth music festival, the latest initiative of Turning Tables.
