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Women’s Hadra Festival in Essaouira: Reviving the Mystical Memory of Women’s Voices
The city of Essaouira is hosting the tenth edition of the Women’s Hadra Festival and Music of the State, organized by the Essaouira Hadras Association, headed by artist Latifa Boumzough. This cultural and artistic event aims to reinterpret Moroccan Sufi heritage from a female perspective, valuing its intangible components that have long been confined to oral transmission and closed ritual spaces. The festival emphasizes that the women’s hadra is not merely a celebratory performance or folkloric practice, but a profound symbolic and aesthetic system rooted in the Moroccan spiritual experience, playing a significant role in shaping collective memory and Sufi sentiment.
The festival kicks off on December 19, 2025, with an inaugural parade in the Manzah Square, marking a celebratory moment open to the public. This event reintegrates women’s hadra into the urban landscape, giving it a communicative dimension that transcends closed venues to reach the city’s audience and visitors. The evening program at the cultural center will feature official speeches from the festival’s administration, representatives from the Marrakech-Safi region, the regional directorate of the Ministry of Youth and Culture – Cultural Sector, and the Essaouira municipality. This clearly expresses institutional support for the event and an increasing awareness of the importance of preserving women’s intangible heritage.
The artistic segment kicks off with spiritual and musical performances celebrating the diversity of regional references within Moroccan women’s hadra. Participants include the Ouled Chatta troupe from Tata, the Essaouira Hadras troupe representing the hosting city, alongside the Aisha Dkaliya troupe from Salé. These performances create a rich expressive tableau, highlighting the interplay of local particularities within a unified Sufi reference and unveiling the richness of women’s expressions in the music of the state.
On the second day, December 20, 2025, the focus shifts to intellectual and academic dimensions at the Memory House, hosting a roundtable discussion on “Women in the Sufi Experience,” moderated by Dr. Nour Eddine Donyaji. This sets the stage for an in-depth discussion regarding women’s roles in constructing spiritual experiences and their contributions to producing Sufi meaning and crafting forms of symbolic expression within Moroccan culture.
The program also includes a scholarly presentation titled “Women’s Hadra in Hassani Culture: The Qadra Dance as a Model,” by researcher and critic Ibrahim Al-Hussein, introduced by critic and artist Shafiq Al-Zakari. This exploration addresses women’s hadra from an anthropological and aesthetic perspective, connecting ritual, movement, and collective memory, and revealing the dialectical relationship between body and spirit in women’s Sufi practice.
Additionally, the event will feature the presentation of the collection “Sufism and Form” in French by poet and visual artist Lubaba Laali, with selected readings in Arabic presented by translator and critic Dr. Abdullah Al-Sheikh. This interactive moment merges poetry and visual art with a Sufi vision, illustrating the potential for overlap between aesthetic expression and spiritual experience.
The festival concludes on the same evening at the cultural center with artistic performances by the Bnat Hadras troupe from Essaouira, the Bnat Benwasat troupe from Marrakech, and the Hind Naira troupe from Essaouira. This edition once again affirms that the women’s hadra constitutes a living space for memory, creativity, and spirit, acting as a cultural bridge between heritage and renewal, and restoring the symbolic and intellectual position of women in preserving and revitalizing Moroccan Sufi memory in a contemporary context.
