Ismail began his artistic career through training at the Conservatory in Casablanca, and he studied alongside Aziz Saadallah, Khadija Asad and others, and participated as an actor in the plays (The Ghoul) and (Our Right to Land).
In 1973, he worked in the plays of Tayeb Saddiki such as (Maqamat Badi Al-Zaman Al-Hamdani), (Sidi Abdel-Rahman Al-Majdoub) and (Al-Sufoud), and in some television sketches by the late director Hamid Bin Al-Sharif, in addition to a dramatic work entitled (The Deserted Village), accompanied by Khadija Asad and Al-Shuaiba Al-Athrawi, Touriya Jabrane, and zhour maamri.
In 1977, Abou El Kanater traveled to the United States to study the art of diagnosis, in fulfillment of a deep desire in himself since childhood, in which he started watching American films in particular in the Mondial and Monte Carlo halls and others with his father, his dream is to one day become an international actor of the caliber of Marlon Brando.
As a result of his influence, he decided to leave the Macbeth play project aside and devote himself to the completion of (One Man Show: Ibn Arabi) through which he will review his travel from Andalusia to Fez, Algeria, Tunisia and Asia, all the way to the home of Jalaluddin Al-Rumi.
And he began to read about the latter and traveled with him in his worlds, and in the end settled his opinion on the completion of a first theatrical work on Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, a second on Ibn Arabi and a third on Macbeth.