What is Ahwach?
ⴰⵃⵡⴰⵛ
A total art in which poetry, two-choir song, dance and drums make a single piece, carried by a whole community.
A total art of the Amazigh south
Ahwach is the great collective form of the Tashelhit-speaking Amazigh communities of southern Morocco. Sung poetry, choral response, dance and frame-drum percussion are not successive numbers: they hold together in one piece, at the height of a celebration. The Encyclopédie berbère and the ethnomusicologist Bernard Lortat-Jacob describe a great sung and danced form driven by the play of the drums; the Larousse encyclopedia calls it at once choreographic, musical and poetic, specific to the Chleuh.
In the south the word is also a generic name for any collective village dance. That is why so many locally named forms, aqlal, ahnqar, ahyad, tahwacht or taskiwin, are presented by Moroccan writers as “types of ahwach”. To speak of Ahwach is to speak both of a precise genre and of a whole family of practices.
Sources Encyclopédie berbère, “Danse” B. Lortat-Jacob, Cahiers de littérature orale Larousse encyclopedia, “ahouach” Hespress
The word and its spellings
The same word is written in several ways depending on language and period: Ahwach is the official Moroccan spelling in French, ahouach the older French transcription, ahwash the usual English form, aḥwaš or aḥwac the scholarly notation, أحواش in Arabic and ⴰⵃⵡⴰⵛ in Tifinagh, following the IRCAM standard. The Tashelhit plural is iḥwašn.
The etymology is not settled. Three explanations circulate: a Tashelhit verb meaning “to sing”, the Arabic-derived word ḥawš, the courtyard or enclosure where people gather, or an Amazigh sense of “movement”. No scholarly source consulted decides between them. This site therefore keeps to the meaning everyone shares: the collective gathering and its dance.
Sources Ma3lama IRCAM, Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe Encyclopédie berbère, “Chleuh”
An undated origin
Researchers and the Moroccan press agree on one point: no document allows the birth of Ahwach to be dated. It is held to be one of the oldest expressions of Amazigh culture in the south.
Local tradition in Ouarzazate makes Télouet, in Glaoua country, the cradle of Ahwach, and the travel writer Jean Mazel granted the Glaoua a certain primacy in 1971. But the Encyclopédie berbère notes that Bernard Lortat-Jacob, in his 1980 monograph, rejects the idea of a Glaoui birthplace. The Glaoua’s reputation as masters of Ahwach is documented; their role as its inventors is not.
Sources Al Quds al-Arabi (Anadolu dispatch), “The Ahwach dance, an old heritage” Ouarzazate Online Encyclopédie berbère, “Danse”
A century of documentation
The first written descriptions date from the protectorate; the first images and recordings follow. Scholarly study of Ahwach then took shape from the 1960s, around ethnomusicology and linguistics. The milestones below are those the sources allow us to establish.
- c. 1920 Marcelin Flandrin photographs an “Ahouach de Ouarzazate”: percussion punctuated by a great drum, call-and-answer song. The image is held by the Maison de la Photographie in Marrakech.
- 1939 Alexis Chottin, “Tableau de la musique marocaine”: he devises a four-line staff to notate the different metres carried at once by different parts of the body.
- 1959 Paul Bowles records some sixty hours of Moroccan music for the Library of Congress, including the ahouache of the Anti-Atlas and High Atlas and the aqlal of the Drâa.
- 1978 and 1980 Bernard Lortat-Jacob publishes, with Hassan Jouad, “La saison des fêtes dans une vallée du Haut-Atlas”, then “Musique et fêtes au Haut-Atlas”, still the reference study of Ahwach.
- 1995 Hassan Jouad, “Le calcul inconscient de l’improvisation”: improvised poetry obeys a closed system of metrical formulas.
- 1997 Miriam Rovsing Olsen, “Chants et danses de l’Atlas”, a book and recording on the Anti-Atlas and the High Atlas.
- 2013 Lortat-Jacob, “L’ahwash berbère du Maroc”, Cahiers de littérature orale: the most accessible synthesis on the structure of a piece.
Sources Maison de la Photographie de Marrakech Library of Congress, Paul Bowles Moroccan Music Collection B. Lortat-Jacob, “Musique et fêtes au Haut-Atlas” (1980), Symétrie publisher page D. Casajus, L’Homme (Persée) M. Rovsing Olsen, “Chants et danses de l’Atlas (Maroc)”, Cité de la musique / Actes Sud, 1997 B. Lortat-Jacob, Cahiers de littérature orale
An art in the Tashelhit language
The map of Ahwach matches the map of Tashelhit, and its poetry is composed in that language. The Encyclopédie berbère treats the ahwach-ahidous pair as the great marker of the Atlas world, both territorial and linguistic: ahwach among the Tashelhit-speaking settled peoples, ahidous among the Tamazight-speaking transhumants.
Moroccan researchers describe Ahwach poets as guardians of the language, who maintain and enrich it through skilled composition. IRCAM, created in 2001, publishes collections of Ahwach poets and programmes troupes at its official celebrations, such as Id n Innayr 2974 in January 2024.
Sources Encyclopédie berbère, “Danse” Encyclopédie berbère, “Chleuh” Hespress, Abdullah Bouchtar, “Ahwach poets, guardians of values” IRCAM, Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe
Heritage status: what is accurate
Ahwach is not inscribed on any UNESCO intangible heritage list. Tourism pages claim otherwise for 2017: they confuse Ahwach with Taskiwin, a martial dance of the western High Atlas related to the Ahwach family, inscribed that year on the Urgent Safeguarding List. A UNESCO file for Ahwach was mentioned in the press in 2017, with no documented filing since.
Nationally, Ahwach appears in the cultural heritage inventory kept by the Ministry, and the “Ahwach Ihahan” of the Haha was entered in November 2022 in the national inventory of intangible heritage, on a file prepared by the Mogador Centre for Studies and Research with the Ahwach Ihahan association of Tamanar. The accurate wording is therefore: Ahwach is recorded in Morocco’s national inventory of intangible heritage; it is not inscribed by UNESCO.
Sources UNESCO, Morocco’s inscribed elements UNESCO, intangible cultural heritage, “Taskiwin” L'Economiste Al Alam