Lila mit Maalem Mustapha Sam & Mqaddma Souad & Maalem Hicham Bilali

Purple. Night. The core of what the Gnawa was born from - not a stage form, not a concert, but a ritual that lasts from sunset to sunrise and in which music, trance and healing become a single movement. The fact that the festival closes with an authentic purple is the only possible gesture: everything that precedes it - the concerts, the films, the panels, the encounters with Yoruba, Candomblé, Tarantella, Flamenco, Desert Blues - flows back into the form from which the Gnawa itself lives when it is at home. For six hours, between midnight darkness and dawn, Maalem Mustapha Sam from Marrakech and his troupe lead the ritual through its strictly coded sequence: the guembri opens the "way", the qraqeb clink in a tireless pulse, the invocations of the Mluk follow in the seven colors, scents and rhythms assigned to them, until the circle closes in the first light of day. Mustapha Sam, known in the Marrakesh Gnawa world simply as "Sam Sghir" - the younger Sam - belongs to that generation of maalems whose authority comes not from record contracts or festival biographies, but from the transmission from hand to hand, from string to string, from purple to purple. The fact that little can be found about him online is part of his significance. The ritual is conducted together with Mqaddma Souad from Marrakech, the head of the ceremony - the female authority who oversees the spiritual course of the night, determines the scents, colors, fabrics and sequences and maintains the connection to the Mluk. It is no coincidence that Lila takes place at SAVVY Contemporary in Wedding: a place that has been dedicated to other forms of knowledge and Afro-diasporic perspectives for years, in a neighbourhood characterized by migration. The festival will not end with a closing event, but will return to its original form - as a six-hour Lila that does not conclude the program, but rather establishes it.

Venue:
SAVVY Contemporary, Reinickendorfer Straße 17, 13347 Berlin-Wedding(Map)

Part of Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Global Echoes of Gnawa.