Crossing Borders: Al-halqa Performance in Morocco from the Open Space to the Theatre Building

[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 attract passersby who form a circle around actors, acrobats, musicians, or around storytellers.

--El-Meskini Sghir (2000:12) ¹

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 1998:19)

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. ² 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, ³ 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 theatricality 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 common 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, ⁴ 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 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 behavior, 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 ⁵ 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. (1997; see also Kapchan 1996...