Aquaquam

Christian authorities in Europe and the Near East spent a great deal of the first millennium legislating dance out of worship, and largely succeeded. The Ethiopian church did the opposite. Aquaquam is not a survival tolerated at the edges of the liturgy, it is a clerical office with a curriculum, a technique and examinations, performed at the centre of the greatest feasts by the most highly trained people in the building.

The justification the tradition gives is scriptural and it is offered without embarrassment: David danced before the ark. Where other churches read that passage as belonging to an earlier dispensation, Ethiopian practice reads it as a warrant. The connection is made concrete in the liturgy, because the tabot, the consecrated altar tablet that represents the ark, is what the clergy process with and dance before on the great feasts, most visibly at Timkat.

The movement itself is restrained. Two rows of debtera face one another, holding the prayer staff upright, and move with a slow stepping and a swaying of the upper body, accelerating gradually across a long performance. The sistrum is shaken on the beat and the kebero drum underneath it carries the pattern. Nothing about it is improvised or ecstatic. A visitor expecting something loose finds a discipline closer to a drill, performed by men who have spent years learning the chant it belongs to before being allowed to move to it at all.

Ethiopian tradition credits the entire chant system to Saint Yared, a deacon of Aksum in the sixth century, who is said to have received the three modes of the chant and set the liturgical year to them. What is certain is that the system attributed to him, with its three modes and its own notation of characters written above the text, is old, is peculiar to Ethiopia, and is the framework within which aquaquam sits. The dance is not a separate art form. It is the bodily part of the chant, and it cannot be learned by someone who does not know the chant.

That is enforced by the structure of the church schools, which are among the longest formal educations of any religious tradition. A student passes through reading, then the chant schools proper, then the schools of poetry, and aquaquam belongs near the end of that sequence. Its own school is a recognised institution with a recognised master, and a graduate carries a title. The whole progression can take twenty years or more, and the people performing at the front of a cathedral on a feast day have completed it.

The two churches that hold the tradition, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, were one body until 1993 and keep the practice in the same form, with the same schools behind it. The tradition also crossed into the wider diaspora in the later twentieth century, and aquaquam is now performed in Ethiopian and Eritrean parishes in North America and Europe by clergy trained in the same way.