Hassan Ouakrim, a Moroccan director and choreographer who helped introduce his country’s Berber dances and traditional music to New York’s downtown theater scene, and developed a sideline staging exuberant North African-themed soirees for the wealthy, died on July 27 in Manhattan. He was believed to be in his early 80s.
His death, at his home in the East Village, was announced by Morocco’s ambassador to the United States, Youssef Amrani, who credited Mr. Ouakrim with introducing “generations of Americans to the beauty of Berber and Saharan expression.”
The Berbers, the mountain-dwelling indigenous peoples of Morocco and its neighbors, are known for their fierce independence, and the multifaceted Mr. Ouakrim, with his freewheeling approach to dancing, directing and acting, lived up to that spirit.
Through a long association with Ellen Stewart, the founder of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club and pioneer of Off Off Broadway theater, Mr. Ouakrim fused his region’s traditional dances, like the Ahwach and Guedra, with the avant-garde approach of Ms. Stewart’s company.
He trained some of La MaMa’s dancers and helped stage notable Moroccan-themed productions there starting in the early 1970s, including “The Night Before Thinking” — based on the author Paul Bowles’ adaptation of a tale by the Moroccan writer and painter Ahmed Yacoubi — and “Zainamoh,” based on a Berber story.
Mr. Ouakrim, a slight, agile man whose vocation was formed among the street performers of Marrakesh, had a second calling as an organizer of the “kitschy Orientalist soiree” for wealthy Manhattanites, the Columbia University scholar Hisham Aidi said.
“If you wanted” such an event, “you go to Hassan,” Mr. Aidi said in an interview. His more important role, though, was to “put Moroccan folk culture on the map in the U.S.,” Mr. Aidi said.
Mr. Aidi’s 2023 documentary film, “A Thousand and One Berber Nights,” chronicles Mr. Ouakrim’s improbable journey from an impoverished, remote village in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains to “New York City’s ‘Oriental’ cabaret subculture” and the “East Village queer scene,” as Mr. Aidi wrote on his website.
As Mr. Ouakrim described it in the film, which premiered at the African Film Festival New York, one soiree in which he was involved — in 1997 at the beachfront Hamptons home of the billionaire investor Carl Icahn — featured Donald Trump, then a real estate developer in the city.
According to Mr. Ouakrim, Mr. Trump grew furious about his mock “arrest” during a lavishly produced party where the theme was the World War II movie “Casablanca.” His detention was part of the festivities, which also included fake Moroccan colonial-era “passports,” military uniforms and a vintage airplane.
Mr. Ouakrim was recruited to play the movie’s police captain, under instructions from Mr. Icahn.
“He told me that when Donald Trump arrives, to have him arrested,” he recalled.
“Trump went to stamp his ‘passport,’” Mr. Ouakrim said. “We told him that he was undocumented. We put him in jail — it was a real jail, iron jail; we put him there. And he got scared; he was very confused. He was angry, then Icahn came and released him. When he got him out, they start fighting. It was really crazy.”
Marcy Blum, of Marcy Blum Events, who organized the “Casablanca” soiree, said in an interview that she did not recall Mr. Ouakrim or the incident involving Mr. Trump. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Ouakrim’s autobiography, “Memoir of a Berber,” contains an undated photograph of himself next to a smiling Mr. Trump and his daughter Ivanka.
The same book details Mr. Ouakrim’s better-known face, as the protégé of Ms. Stewart, one of the innovators of late 20th-century American theater.
She was fascinated by African dance forms and had an affinity for Morocco and especially Tangier, where Mr. Bowles lived, and where members of the Beat Generation, like the poet Allen Ginsberg, visited in the 1960s.
Mr. Ouakrim had founded a Berber dance theater workshop in Tangier called Inosiss — “a fusion of modern dance with mystical music,” he wrote in his memoir. He was already established as a director there, having developed a national theater in Morocco and performed adaptations of Molière and Shakespeare.
In 1969, Ms. Stewart saw him perform in Tangier, and she subsequently invited him to help in the La MaMa production of the Bowles adaptation.
Videos from his La MaMa shows of that era depict swirls of dancers in Moroccan costume, accompanied by the hypnotic plinking of Moroccan lutes and the piping of reed flutes.
Not everybody was convinced. Inosiss under Mr. Ouakrim’s direction came to La MaMa in 1982 for a “nightclub belly dance that had a faintly spurious air and certainly seemed unrehearsed,” the dance critic Jennifer Dunning wrote in The New York Times.
“One performer succeeded in getting her live snake tangled in her hair,” Ms. Dunning wrote.
“Hassan Wakrim, who conceived the program, did a little dance that fully lived up to his warning that it was ‘very improvised,’” she continued, using an alternate English spelling for Mr. Ouakrim’s last name.
But by then, he had established a place in Ms. Stewart’s repertoire, and her affections.
“She invited me for three months, and I stayed for 50 years,” Mr. Ouakrim said in the film.
Ms. Stewart, for her part, called him “a serious and creative artist” and “a master teacher of all the various Berber dances” in her introduction to his memoir. She refers to him as “my son.”
Hassan Ouakrim was born in the early 1940s in the village of Aday, near Tafraout in the Anti-Atlas mountains, one of several children of Mohammed and Aicha Ouakrim. There is some uncertainty about the year of his birth, and Mr. Ouakrim was not a stickler for such details, Mr. Aidi said.
His father, a charcoal seller outside the Casbah in Tangier, sent for him to be educated in that city when he was 7. As he described the episode movingly in his memoir, he left his village by bus with his older brother and made a lonely voyage across French Morocco.
His father enrolled him in a school run by the colonizers, École Poncey, though Hassan spoke only the Berber language, Amazigh. “Students knew by my looks that I was an ‘insider’ — from the mountains, a low-class Berber indigene,” he wrote.
He received his primary school certificate in 1953 and was sent south to live with an uncle in Marrakesh and to continue his studies. His real education, he noted in his memoir, took place on the city’s Jamaa el-Fnaa square, where he observed intently the “throng of troubadours, musicians, healers and fake doctors,” Mr. Aidi wrote in a 2019 profile.
The streets of the square “had been my deliverance from the harsh and cruel path that began with a smoky bus ride from my hometown,” Mr. Ouakrim wrote.
He returned to Tangier to finish high school, attended theater and mime workshops, was chosen to dance at the Theater Royal in Gibraltar in 1958, and became involved in the national theater movement in Tangier in 1960, Mr. Aidi wrote. Inosiss was founded in 1968.
Mr. Ouakrim leaves no immediate survivors.
“He was part performer, part shaman,” Mr. Aidi said in the interview, noting that Mr. Ouakrim avoided walking on subway grates from which steam was escaping for fear of djinns, or spirits. “He dabbled in this folklore and kitsch,” Mr. Aidi said.
“I’m not searching to become famous,” Mr. Ouakrim said in the film, adding, in reference to the mystical branch of Islam to which he adhered, “I am a human being, a sane, modest Sufi man.”
Aida Alami contributed reporting.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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