Crossing Borders

Crossing Borders Al-halqa Performance in Morocco from the Open Space to the Theatre Building Khalid Amine [A]l-halqa is the didactic and entertaining space of the general public from different walks of life. [...H]alqas are characterized by the representation of the traditional repertoire based on fantastic stories and myths that at- tract passersby who form a circle around actors, acrobats, musicians, or around storytellers. —El-Meskini Sghir (:) The disavowal of Western culture cannot in itself constitute a culture, and the delirious roaming around the lost self shall never stir it up from dust. —Abdellah Laroui (in Abdellatif :) Al-halqa is a public gathering in the form of a circle around a performer or a number of performers (hlayqi/hlayqia) in a public space, be it a marketplace, a medina gate, or a newly devised downtown square. It is a space of popular culture that is open to all people from different walks of life. Al-halqa hovers between high culture and low mass culture, sacred and profane, literacy and orality. Its repertoire combines fantastic, mythical, and historical narratives from A Thousand and One Nights and Sirat bani hilal, as well as stories from the holy Quran and the Sunna of the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him). The form of the halqa also varies from storytelling to acrobatic acting and dancing. My main objective in this article is to highlight al-halqa’s theat- ricality as a performance space and to critique its transposition to the stage building, a transposition that has intensified al-halqa’s hybridity and performative yet ironic double effects. The morphology of the Arabo-Islamic city as manifested in some ancient medinas in Morocco (like Fes and Marrakech), reveals that the circle is a com- mon paradigm in the refashioning of the city as well as the social imaginary of its inhabitants. The Moroccan medina is most often a square section of the city surrounded by a wall and many gates/doors, with the mosque(s) located at the center as a spiritual icon, as well as a commanding and surveying cultural apparatus. Concentric circles are organized hierarchically around the The Drama Review , (T), Summer . Copyright © New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402760157682 by guest on 01 October 2021 Khalid Amine mosque, from the most privileged artifacts, bazaars, and houses located near the center to minor workplaces and poor areas of the outer circles that face the gates. Al-halqa performance, as a free and state-licensed expressive behav- ior, is mostly situated at the medina gates and marketplaces—far from the sacred center and its sacred didactic halqas. It is a tolerated form of voicing the boundaries between sacred and profane. However, colonial intervention has affected the morphology of most Moroccan cities, giving birth to new cities (villes nouvelles) beside the old ones. In most cases, the result is the creation of new centers and peripheries whereby the old gates and open squares ( Jema’ el-fna is a case in point) have become centers that criss-cross different worlds. The circular form is also manifested in the nomadic life of Moroccan peasants living in the duwar (which literally means a circle). In the medieval Moroccan society, a duwar was a circle of tents of the nomads whose cattle were kept inside the circle in order to be well supervised. Thus, the circle is deeply rooted in the morphology of Moroccan architecture as well as the social imaginary of Moroccan people. Al-halqa, then, has been perpetuated as a free and liberating site of social tolerance. Deborah A. Kapchan identifies the relationship between the sacred and the profane within the space of al-halqa as an oscillation that is fueled by tension yet resolved within the performance. She argues that: Morocco is a sacred society where the official discourses of Islam provide both counterpoint and drone to the languages of license and commodification that symbolize the marketplace; indeed because “official order and...ideology” are perpetually present, the profane and the untrustworthy come into relief. (; see also Kapchan ) Though al-halqa is situated on the periphery of the circle, it functions as an entertaining social commentary—that sometimes amounts to parody—on what is going on inside the circle. It is a carnivalesque mirror whose reflection flickers back and forth, from the inside-out to the outside-in, encompassing the whole circular medina. Al-halqa is the most overtly theatrical genre of performance among several that take place in the public spheres of the marketplace and medina gates. How does al-halqa contribute to the shaping of both Moroccan . This drawing shows Al- halqa, a public gathering in the form of a circle, as prac- ticed in most popular sites in Morocco. (Drawing by Abdou Ajwaw) Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402760157682 by guest on 01 October 2021 Al-Halqa individual and communal identity? Does it actively contribute to the construc- tion of Moroccan cultural identity or merely reflect a given environment? Al-halqa has been a vital source of artistic delight and entertainment in all its diversity, as well as a means of constructing cultural identity. Besides its aesthetic aspects as a performance event, it is a medium for providing information and circulating social energy, a social drama and a subsidiary school whose syllabus is as fluid as its rich repertoire. In sum, al-halqa contributes to the representation of historical consciousness and cultural identity, through formulaic artistic ex- pression. Philip D. Schuyler acknowledges the many functions of al-halqa: Not so long ago, market performers served vital functions in Moroccan society. The itinerant entertainers acted as journalists, carrying news from one market to the next. Public preachers offered moral guidance and ex- planations of religious texts to a largely illiterate public. Comedians pro- vided political and social commentary. Storytellers gave lessons in history. Musicians put all these messages into song. (:) Richard Bauman argues that narratives—existing within spaces like al- halqa—are vehicles “for the encoding and presentation of information about oneself in order to construct a personal and social image” (:). Seen from a Bakhtinian perspective, these stories and narrative utterances, which are strongly affiliated with individual and communal lives, have been repeated often enough to become artfully narrative performances that bear clear refer- ences to the individual’s sense of identity. Al-halqa is a popular performance framed in a circular architecture and characterized by the making of spectacle as a process in motion rather than a final product presented to a passive consumer. Given al-halqa’s capacity to implicate “Others,” it negotiates the differing relationships among its participants. And in the process, it reformulates cultural values and self-knowledge as it engages its audience in a constant game of role- playing. The performance imbues the human actions of the narratives with a heightened potential to shape, reflect, and mirror cultural identity. This aes- thetically marked space is a constantly rehearsed oral text that is told through artistic expressions ranging from narrative folktales and storytelling to ritualistic dancing, theatrical pantomime, and improvisation. Al-halqa encompasses all these genres and representational practices in a single performance text, a text that is dialogical through and through since it is constructed as patterns of infi- nitely self-erasing traces or arché-écriture. Al-halqa’s textual practice, however, transcends the boundaries of the written word as a scriptocentric closure, for it is a dynamic network of interrelated codes that are not necessarily linguistic. In a related context, Roland Barthes, after being liberated from his early logocentric structuralism, informed us that, “[a]ll signifying practices can en- gender a text: the practice of painting pictures, musical practice, filmic practice, etc. The works, in certain cases, themselves prepare the subversion of the genres, of the homogeneous classes to which they have been assigned” (:). In Barthean terms, al-halqa can be seen as a site of textuality rather than a nontextual oral delivery, for orature is no less important than literature as regards textuality. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402760157682 by guest on 01 October 2021 Khalid Amine In al-halqa performance, “the aesthetic dimension comes to the fore as performers accept responsibility not only for what they do, but also for how they do it. The audience of a performance maintains a dual focus, attending to what is said and done, and how it is accomplished” (Bauman :). Al-halqa, in this sense, has a managed environment that is strictly opposed to the Euro- centric closed theatrical institution. Its audience are called upon “to drift” spon- taneously into an arc surrounding the performance from all sides. The space required by the hlayqi (the maker of the spectacle) is not a specific space, and the timing of the performance is random. No fourth wall with hypnotic fields is erected between stage and auditorium, for such binary opposition does not ex- ist in al-halqa. Any marketplace or medina gate can be transformed into a stage; the entire circle is a playing area, as open as the al-halqa’s repertoire of narratives and dances. Al-halqa, then, is a popular performance framed in a circular architecture and characterized by the making of spectacle as a process in motion rather than a final product presented to a passive consumer. In The Voices of Marakesh, Ellias Canetti provides a significant description of al-halqa, though without an a priori knowledge of the performance. In the section called “Storytellers and Scribes,” he starts his surveying narrative with: “The largest crowds are drawn by the storytellers.

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