Moroccan chaabi women’s ensemble
Marrakech, Morocco, and New York, New York
The women of Bnat el Houariyat perform women’s celebratory music from the heart of Marrakech. Percussion and call-and-response vocals build into a deeply transporting sonic experience rooted in the joys and sorrows of daily life, creating for their audiences a feeling of universal human connection. As dancer Esraa Warda told Vogue Arabia, these women “are famous, older, well-respected musicians. They are not world superstars. But most big-time artists in North Africa have learned rhythm and percussion from them.” Esraa continues, “They break barriers around being women artists, Africans, Arabs, Berbers, and Muslims in public space.”
Bnat el Houariyat (“the girls of Houara”) is an intergenerational sextet in the laâbat tradition, women’s percussion groups who perform incisive, often humorous songs about daily life, primarily for home weddings and women’s celebratory gatherings. They specialize in two local genres, houara and chaabi. Chaabi broadly refers to popular North African musics rooted in working-class tradition (chaab means people in Arabic). While chaabi has instrumental and electrified variants, Bnat el Houariyat play their distinctly Moroccan chaabi “sec” (“dry,” or “straight up”), using only voices and percussion. Houara, from which they take their name, is a hybrid of the traditions of Arabs and the Amazigh, the local indigenous people known to outsiders as the Berber. Houara comes originally from southwestern Morocco, and Bnat el Houariyat gives houara’s traditional repertoire of songs, mostly addressed to saints, a “Marrakechi” interpretation. Both genres employ call-and-response singing and complex polyrhythms, which in the case of houara can bring listeners and dancers into trance states. Instrumentation ranges from the more recognizable bendir frame drum and goblet-like taarija to the tabsil, a women’s invention using finger cymbals to tap out a high resonance on a tea plate to emulate the sound of the ritual iron castanets called qraqeb.
Bandleader Khadija El Warzazia is both a traditionalist and a trailblazer, one of the first women to publicly perform gnawa, the Moroccan ritual music with a global following. She grew up immersed in this tradition and in houara, which she learned from women elders in her community, including her mother and the great Lalla Kenza. Khadija, who jokes that she was the child who always wanted to emcee the party, left school early to pursue life as a musician. She has since built a reputation from her home base in the Medina, the old walled city of Marrakech, as a widely sought teacher famous for her work with gnawa maâlem Abdelkabir Merchane, and for nearly three decades as the leader of Bnat el Houariyat.
Bnat el Houariyat is accompanied by the mesmerizing young dancer Esraa Warda, a “rebellious spirit” known for her profound performances of the trance-like jedba hair-swaying dance. Esraa trained in traditional women’s dance with elders in her community, from her parents’ living room in New York City to family weddings in Algeria, and has emerged as this generation’s leading advocate for and teacher of North African dance in the U.S. In Marrakech in 2018, Khadija saw Esraa dancing as a wedding guest and invited her to perform with the group that evening. Khadija is now Esraa’s mentor, as Esraa puts it, “paving the spiritual and musical path for me in Morocco as a dancer,” while Esraa works to bring international attention to the powerful message and captivating music of the women of Bnat el Houariyat.
More about Bnat el Houariyat, as well as additional videos and tracks, available at the Remix Culture website.