Artistic directors : Alain Weber & Lahsen Hira

With Raysa Fatima Tabaamrant, Rays Said Outajjajt, Rays Moulay Hmad Ihihi, les Cheikhates du Moyen Atlas, Mint Aichata.

This show, especially created for the musée du quai Branly in 2009, was designed as homage to the poetic wealth of Amazigh (Berber) culture.
Huddled in little villages disseminated throughout the valleys of the Moroccan Atlas mountains or in the desert plain of the Souss, the Berber population developed a culture remarkable for its diversity and splendor.

The most profound expression of the Berber soul lies in the music and songs passed on from generation to generation and continually reinvented. It is inspired by the striking beauty of the rural country and the difficulty of the day-to-day, calling on a certain prosaic poetry.

Izlan, imurig, urar, isfra…these different terms from spoken Berber indicate the art of versification. Fundamentally oral, poetry is the expression of people often illiterate, but gifted with a clairvoyance and infinitely rich literary expression.

Poetry in the Berber world is linked to the song and dance governed by the beat of the bendir and that overlaps daily village life. A forum for the expression of identity, poetry accompanies in effect everyone from birth to death (from lullabies to funerary songs),  punctuates daily work (labor and harvests), animates and directs rituals and rites of passage (marriage), constitutes the beating heart of festive ceremonies (ahwach and other collective dances)…

The poet or poetess reveals him/herself as a veritable carrier of words; they make themselves the echo of the difficulties of their community, by formulating its sentiments, its morale, its vision of the world, and its diverse positions in the face of local, national, and even international realities. For, if a Berber poetry of the rural world exists, there is another city version imprinted with a cosmopolitan modernity.

 Grateful thanks to the Musée du quai Branly in Paris