About us

Gnawa Berlin is a band of musicians and dancers based in this city, playing Gnawa: the ritual trance music brought to Morocco by West African peoples and shaped over centuries into something entirely its own.

We came together in this city, from Morocco and from elsewhere, and we play the repertoire the way we learned it: long, patient, built on repetition. A guembri sets the ground, the qraqeb thicken the pulse, and one voice calls while the rest answer. Nothing hurries. The music works by accumulation, and then it lifts.

We play the usual Gnawa repertoire, including the pieces that belong to the lila. A lila is a night-long Moroccan ceremony of healing that runs from dusk until dawn, led by a maâlem. Its suites are performed in a fixed order, and each one is addressed to a particular spirit and to the colour associated with it, so the night moves through those colours in turn. What we give in Berlin is a concert rather than a ceremony, but we keep that order and the seriousness with which the pieces are handled, because the music does not really work without them.

You will find us in venues, at festivals, and walking through the city in procession on midsummer nights. We also run open workshops where anyone can pick up a pair of qraqeb and learn a pattern. No experience is needed, and no instrument of your own.