Dance, gesture and ceremony
In the evening, on the village square: clapping hands, swaying shoulders, feet marking time, and a precise order in space.
The body as instrument
In Ahwach the whole body belongs to the orchestra. Hand-clapping is constant in many variants, to the point that a field foundation describes it as an instrument in its own right; the swaying of the torso, the movement of the shoulders and stamped steps carry the beat with the drums. Women’s ululations punctuate the slow introduction and signal the passage from one section to the next.
The dance intensifies in stages as the drums accelerate and the text falls away; the fast final section is the dance proper, the derst.
Sources Hespress High Atlas Foundation Sudestmaroc.com, A. Didi, “Ahwach, between tradition and collective memory” Institut du monde arabe
Circles, semicircles, facing lines
Formations are a single ring, a semicircle or two facing lines; the women’s ring may split into two rows that answer each other. When men and women take part together, space separates them: the men hold the centre with the drums, the women form a ring around them or two facing lines. Single-sex Ahwach also exist.
In general the men produce the rhythm (drums, naqus, lead chant) and the women dance, sing the responses, clap and ululate, with regional exceptions such as Télouet, where women lead the vocal line. Around Ouarzazate, a local account describes women focused on the rhythm who do not turn, the men’s movement being in the feet and the women’s in synchronised hand gestures.
Sources Encyclopédie berbère, “Danse” A. Aydoun, e-taqafa.ma (Fondation Hassan II pour les MRE) Hespress Ouarzazate Online
Those who lead
The names of the leading figures vary from place to place. The rais is the leader, often the lead drummer; the a’allam, the lead dancer or conductor; the anddam, in the Souss, the poet who wins the joust; the amarir, the singer-poet. In Imintanout a “messenger” repeats the poet’s lines to the group.
Imintanout also distinguishes two levels within one village: an elite Ahwach of experienced poets and musicians, and a youth Ahwach in which boys and girls learn through competitive exchanges.
Sources Géoparc du Jbel Bani, “Ahwach, dance and music of the Chleuh country” Ma3lama Encyclopédie berbère, “Chleuh”
When Ahwach is held
Traditionally in the evening, after the last prayer, on the open square of the village, the assays or asarag. For weddings (tamghra), circumcisions, the harvest and the turning points of the farming year, religious feasts and moussems, the welcoming of guests, and today for festivals.
Among the Ayt Mgun of the central High Atlas, music is everyone’s affair: who to invite, who will play and what will be sung are decided collectively. The association of unmarried young men, the laamt, organises the Ahwach, and an adult man withdraws once his eldest son joins it. Other sources state that only unmarried women dance: practice, including on festival stages, shows women of all ages, and this rule is at best local.
Sources Géoparc du Jbel Bani, “Ahwach, dance and music of the Chleuh country” High Atlas Foundation B. Lortat-Jacob, Cahiers de littérature orale Al Quds al-Arabi (Anadolu dispatch), “The Ahwach dance, an old heritage”
Dress and jewellery by region
There is no single Ahwach costume. White predominates almost everywhere for men, silver for women; beyond that, each region keeps its own custom.
In Ouarzazate and Taourirt, men wear the white farajiya and jellaba, belgha slippers, the turban and the dagger, the koummiya, locally called tkmit; women wear embroidered belgha, the takchita or caftan, and the tatreft, a cloth worn over the dress. In Aoulouz, near Taroudant, women add to the caftan the white tattereft, the red leqtib scarf and silver jewellery. In Imintanout, women wear the long dfina dress, the silver-and-coral taounza crown and a necklace of linked pieces, the tifelit, which sounds with movement; men a wrapped cloth three and a half metres long, the rza. In Tiznit, the association’s troupe dresses uniformly in white.
Sources Ouarzazate Online High Atlas Foundation Ma3lama Géoparc du Jbel Bani