ABOUT AHWASH
#SOURCEAḥwash (Ahwach / ⴰⵃⵡⴰⵛ / أحواش) is a diverse Amazigh tradition of chanted poetry in a form of collective dance-singing, typical for Moroccan Atlas Mountains and the surrounding areas. This practice, usually performed outdoors, is based on repetitions and polyrhythms, allowing participants to delve into the essence of community and the intrinsic connection between sound, movement, and the environment. The dance consists of delicate movements, always staying close to the body’s axis, embodying balance as the moral ethos of Amazigh culture.
The practice of Aḥwash is an example that not only the verbal layer of music can convey knowledge. Qualities such as communality, rootedness, independence within interconnectedness, as well as balance - in every sense of the word - can be practiced, understood, and embodied through music and dance.
“The term aḥwash refers to several local varieties of a Berber rural collective dance in which participants sing while dancing. This idiom of chanted poetry is found in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains and the surrounding areas.
It consists of musical, poetic, choreographic and behavioral elements, which are typical of the Berber culture in Morocco. Depending on subgenres and/or localities, aḥwash singing dance is performed by men and/or women, together or separately, before an always mixed audience. The event takes place outdoors at the forum place of the village, most of the time during summer; thus it will be heard all over in the surrounding vicinity, most of all that the unison voice register is typically high and loud. The dance is very sober and gentle as to its movements. That means that participants move their shoulders very gently up and down and impress rhythmically measured movements and beats with their feet and clapping hands, while the part of the body between belly and hips is kept modestly straight. These gentle moves derive from an aesthetic and moral ethos in this society: everything should be balanced.
Participants initiated into the art can improvise on both the text and the melody. Lyrics are metrically measured according to a quantitative meter. They are set to tune on a pentatonic scale that characterizes the Tashlhiyt Berber music in general. There’s a large traditional repertory of repetitive melodies to which successive poetic lines are associated in turn. But it happens from time to time that, in a given performance, a poet improvises at the same time a new tune associated to his/her improvised poetic text contextually connected to the relevant socio-cultural occasion. Depending on step and stage in an aḥwash event, singing is performed either as a recitative in the beginning, or as a measured singing accompanied with an impressive polyrhythmic drums percussion at the end. Any leading poet may take the lead and create an opening couple of lines, inventing his own blessing sentences that functions as the opening of the ceremony. After the opening sentences, he/she can go right to the heart of the relevant topic, according to the nature of the event, launching thus a central theme that is characterized by its symbolic and profound meanings.
On the semantic level, Tashlyiit Berber poetry functions on through two dimensions: the first is the overt meaning, literally determined by lexicon and syntax, and the second, the hidden meaning encoded in metaphorical and allegorical terms.”