I started this research with two dissertations, "The Networked Self: Hip Hop Musicking and Muslim Identities in Neoliberal Morocco" by Kendra Renée Salois and "Embodied Authenticity in Moroccan Contemporary Dance" by Karima Wolfe Borni. These two sources provide rich, in-depth accounts and great analysis of both the hip hop and contemporary dance scenes in Morocco. Here's what I learned from them both. 

I. The Networked Self: Hip Hop Musicking and Muslim Identities in Neoliberal Morocco by Kendra Renée Salois
In her dissertation “The Networked Self: Hip Hop Musicking and Muslim Identities in Neoliberal Morocco,” Kendra Renée Salois investigates the histories, practices, experiences, and communities of Moroccan hip hop "musickers" (a term she introduces) through ethnographic research of their “aesthetic preferences, performance practice, disciplinary strategies, and socio-musical networks” (1). Salois defines a musicker as someone who takes part, in any capacity, in a musical performance as a way to acknowledge the audience as an active participant, to more accurately reflect “the ways hip hop practitioners socialize and learn” (13) and to encompass the many roles that individual Moroccans frequently occupy at different times, events, or stages of their lives (often the same people are or have been dancers, djs, managers, organizers, listeners and/or fans). She argues that while Moroccan youth use hip hop as a tool to create a counterpublic and reclaim narrative agency from the political elite to create an “alternative representation of a pious youthful Moroccan subject” (24), their participation in hip hop networks actively creates the conditions for a state-serving neoliberal subjectivity. Through her extensive multi-year, multi-site, embodied & virtual ethnography and her ethnomusical lense, Salois uses the frameworks of network theory and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to ultimately reach the conclusion that “by locating their critiques in the terrain of the self rather than in movement-based politics, artists and their audiences effect political quietism through, not despite, their embrace of the transnational hip hop tradition’s normative ideology of critique and opposition as both a stylistic and an ethical goal” (1). She traces how the notable elements of neoliberalization, including “the legalized spatialization of social classes, the reduction of the public labor force, the privatization of industries including radio and telecommunications, the provision of services by internationally-funded NGOs, and the creation of new markets for tourism” (93) appeared over the same period of years that hip hop musicking began to flourish within Moroccan society. Additionally, she explores how the hip hop festival circuit has served as a prime location to promote a vision of a specific kind of Moroccan youth that benefits from neoliberal policy; one who takes pride in their cosmopolitanism, who has the desire and class mobility to go concerts of Western stars, who consumes the latest trends, and treats the self as a brand. Thus her work gives insight not only to the specific positioning of Moroccan hip hop musickers, but also their role in the rapidly changing post-colonial, neoliberal landscape of Moroccan society. 

This dissertation will be one of the central texts of my paper, as it is the most robust in its description and analysis of the lives, socio-political conditions, histories and implications of the practices of Moroccan hip hop practitioners. Though primarily focusing on the general category of musicker (which applies to dancers but isn’t exclusive to them) or focusing on musicians/rappers when she becomes specific, Salois amasses and shares a fair amount of data on specifically dancers. For example, she explains that b-boying and b-girling were first introduced to Morocco in the early 1990s through existing networks of migrants to and from Francophone Europe, and that many interviewees explained that their first entry point into any form of hip hop culture was through dance, acquiring moves from friends or from satellite television, before learning to rap, write, or dj. I plan to use the analysis she’s written about hip hop musickers general interaction with/how their practices support of the neoliberalizing state in conjunction with the specific data she’s amassed about the lineages and institutions of street dance, like the Complexe Culturel Sidi Belyout, the Moroccan Underground Foundation, Festival de Casablanca etc. While the whole dissertation is relevant to my project, I specifically plan to focus on chapters four and five which explore Moroccan music festivals and hip hop’s relationship to tourism and the formation of a hip hop counterpublic respectively. These will give me primary source material to draw on for evidence and help me in making my argument that a street dance practice allows individual Moroccan young people to reclaim their individual narrative agency and experience embodied feelings of power, while simultaneously serving neoliberal state interests.

Salois, K. R. (2013). The Networked Self: Hip Hop Musicking and Muslim Identities in Neoliberal Morocco. UC Berkeley. ProQuest ID: Salois_berkeley_0028E_13618. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5xs8zxd. Retrieved from escholarship.org/uc/item/3jm9z2n7

II. Embodied Authenticity in Moroccan Contemporary Dance by Karima Wolfe Borni  

In her dissertation “Embodied Authenticity in Moroccan Contemporary Dance,” Karima Wolfe Borni aims to understand why contemporary dancers and choreographers in Morocco are so hyper-focused on producing “authentic images,” given the many transnational influences in their practices and the context of Moroccan society. Through her anthropological ethnography of the dance communities in Marrakesh and Casablanca and her in depth interviews with artistic directors, choreographers and dance education organizers and producers, Borni explores how contemporary dancers construct their authentic selves, while simultaneously embodying the societal tension between segments of the Moroccan population who believe in freedom of expression and those who believe firmly in customary Muslim restrictions regarding the display of the body in public. She argues that because of this, “contemporary dance provides opportunities for observing the ways in which state policies take the form of cultural politics” and also “reflects the crosscurrents of policy and the array of responses to the use of dance as a vehicle of change in the moral and political economies” (21). Thus, she discerns that, while authenticity has become such a prevalent discourse in the contemporary dance world of Morocco, concerns about authenticity are also indicative of the anxieties of Moroccan citizens as a whole, who feel “caught between dependence on the West and the centrifugal or divergent moral, political, and economic dynamics within the kingdom” (85). Through tracing the history and context of this anxiety throughout the Arab world (for example, Islamist lawmakers in Egypt trying to ban ballet in 2013) Borni illustrates how the competing discourses of cultural authenticity and acceptable comportment within traditional Islamic values, versus personal authenticity and bodily liberation, are both deeply rooted in this negotiation of the boundaries between Moroccan national identity and the West. She writes that the process these dancers are navigating “interweaves the Euro-American aesthetic concept of authenticity with the Moroccan lexicon of social worthiness” (24). Furthermore, Borni argues that while in Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and other Arab countries, overtly politicized contemporary dance companies and festivals have been created in response to governmental upheaval, in Morocco the “liberation” sought through contemporary dance engages in the discourse of personal bodily liberation from cultural norms, especially in regards to gender, but “stops short of political activism or reference to the urban demonstrations of 2011”. Instead their primary focus is freeing the body from customary religious restraints.

This dissertation is extremely useful to my research because in Morocco the worlds of street dance and contemporary dance are very intertwined. Many of the dancers who audition for and end up in Moroccan dance companies begin dancing as street dancers and much of the movement lexicon is intentionally or unintentionally taken from hip hop/breaking vocabularies.

During interviews and casual conversations, several of Borni’s informants explained that their harsh urban environment served as motivation for their movement. She writes that “the aggressive, fast, and hectic rhythms of heavily placed steps, the pulsing intensity of musical scores, and “in your face,” aggressive performance style showed the clear influence of global hip-hop dance in their choreographies and improvisations” (91).  Her informants often attributed this movement to their identity as Casaoui, or as being residents of/having roots in the poorer neighborhoods of Casablanca explaining that “sharp elbows jutting outward, clenched fists, head bowed, shoulders bent over, and fast or even running movements represented the male Casaoui style of contemporary dance in the studio” (91).  As far as these movements were considered original and not stemming from popular media or hip hop/break dance culture, they were incorporated by contemporary dance workshop leaders and visiting artists into pieces they considered to be improvisational. Borni observed that because of this, the process of setting improvisational dance pieces often resulted in final products that represented “the present struggles of youth in Casablanca and, more generally, dancers’ feelings of closed off opportunity in the country at large” (92). This is interesting and useful for my work. Moroccan contemporary dancers often have break dance/street dance roots, are conveying similar representations to what hip hop musickers are expressing about lack of opportunity/unemployment etc.. They are also navigating similar anxieties about the influence of the West, and commodification through modes of dance circulation, like festivals, and are focusing the locus of their critique/rebellion on the self/body and not the political institution. In light of this, I see the contemporary dancers are still doing borderwork between themselves and breakers, creating a clear delineation of how they are distinguished from street dancers. I want to use this dissertation, especially the second and third chapter to expand my lens and illustrate how the anxieties/discourses around breaking manifest in the contemporary dance sector, and also in conjunction with Salois’s discussion of hip hop musickers’ construction of authenticity in the  Embodied Listening and Counterpublic Formations in Moroccan Hip Hop piece that I also discuss here. In my paper I also engage the fouth chapter, which is about the politics of international dance festivals in conjunction with my analysis of Lil Zoo’s participation in the international breaking finals.

Borni, Karima W. Embodied Authenticity in Moroccan Contemporary Dance, Northwestern University, Ann Arbor, 2016. ProQuest, http://ccl.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ccl.idm.oclc.org/docview/1826355543?accountid=10141.