Lu Alexandra Talks Circus Arts: Chapter 254: Aakash Odedra's Songs of the Bulbul

Before I write my fourth and final post on Ensemble Festival, about Garbh, a Gujarati dance performance, I need to take a step back for a moment to provide some context and continuity. That means rewinding to earlier this summer, when I went to Sadler's Wells East in Stratford to see Songs of the Bulbul by Aakash Odedra Dance Company. It was a contemporary dance piece based on a Sufi tale of a songbird that evokes the fleetingness of life. It had cropped up on Instagram, and I was curious.

Sufism, the mystical tradition within Islam, has a habit of turning up in my life without my ever going looking for it. I first came across the term at sixth form when the progressive nuns at school brought the work of Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello into class, a writer heavily criticised by the Catholic Church, an outlier. His books on breathing and Awareness were threaded with Sufi stories, including the world of Nasrudin in One Minute Nonsense. I loved the humour, that sudden “bouffe”, the preserve of clowning, whether the Master gives the pupil a metaphorical or literal comedy slap in the face to jolt them out of their assumptions, from illusion to reality. So a few years later, when a flatmate asked me what I pictured a Sufi looked like I answered with utter confidence "An Indian monk sitting on a hillside somewhere deep in meditation". She fell about laughing. I had been living with one for months and had no idea. As de Mello would say, neti, neti, not that, not that. And then Sufism came to me through music. A university friend spent time out in Turkey studying the Whirling Dervishes for his dissertation as part of a Music degree, and made tapes for me, while a Spanish mentor friend gave me a cassette of the ney and a book of Sufi poet Ansari, Gritos del Corazón, that I still dip into.

Cries of the heart indeed. This year, with the death of my mother and a body that is struggling to keep up, it feels as though my heart really is crying out, what now? Where to go from here? A wise friend recommended The Conference of the Birds, Attar's parable of enlightenment about a flock of birds on a quest to find the fabled Simorgh. Birds are very much part of my life. I now have the small cushion on which I cross-stitched a pair of blue tits chirruping to their young, which Mum kept beside her to the end. There is the owl in my study that my father carved, the robin on the Common I talk to, thinking hello Dad, and the solitary magpie I salute. They each have their own character. I seem to have been collecting bird metaphors for years. An old post of mine, Bird with a Broken Wing, suddenly came to mind, so I went back and reread it. The themes of fragility, vulnerability and still finding a way to fly seem to resonate here (Chapter 16 - click here). Another recommendation was Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love, the story of an unfulfilled housewife inspired by the deep love between the poet Rumi and the mystic Shams, which I listened to on Audible as a bedtime story to dream on. I don't feel remotely unfulfilled, life has been so rich with experience, but I am seeking clarity. Maybe it's the brain fog, the sense that time is running out and I can't quite wake up. But by the time I walked into Sadler's Wells East with her, I had a whole private mythology built up around what this evening was going to be and what impact it was going to have.

The stage was set with a bed of rose petals and, to the left, a semicircle of candles. The simplicity of the design and other-worldly lighting created a place for the soul to breathe and rest. I knew nothing about the actual story and when Aakash Odedra introduced it, my heart dropped like a stone.

The performance would tell the story of the fabled Bulbul, a songbird whose yearning for the divine is expressed through its song. The dance would take us on a journey of three acts, from the freedom of the bird to its capture and increasing confinement and finally into the ultimate darkness. The cage gets smaller, the light diminishes, the circles tighten, until the bird is left with nothing but itself and the essence of its song.

I am writing now, having seen the production well over a month ago, and the impression of the performance is still vivid. The fact that Rushil Ranjan's music, the album Songs of the Bulbul, is on Spotify certainly keeps that connection alive. Like the dance, the music creates a sacred space for the meeting between cultures, bringing together the sounds of Western classical orchestra with Sufi devotional chanting, and it really does sing to the aching joy of the whole experience.

What I remember from the first act is the magic of what appears to be a rag bundle on the floor suddenly coming to life, unfurling into a bird, stretching out to explore the space around it and celebrate sheer physical freedom, its feet stamping out an explosive rhythm like a racing heartbeat. Odedra doesn't mime a bird, he becomes it. His body adopts the mannerisms effortlessly, instinctively. The turn of his hands, the pecking movement. There is an extraordinary precision to it, but never a sense of effort. He can be delicate one moment and astonishingly powerful the next, and somehow the technique disappears into the character. His physical range matches the epic sweep of the music, and it is exhilarating to watch. The wild bird is captured and caged, yet because it can still see the world beyond its bars, it continues to sing with pure joy at the beauty of life, and his movement sweeps and soars like the music. As he turns, the lift of his skirt sends the rose petals flying so the air seems itself to be singing. It is intoxicating, and he captures a sense of limitless horizons through the sheer expansive physicality of grace and movement.

And yet we know what is coming.

The second act portrays the world contracting and it feels like ours does too. Heavy metal cylinders drop from above, like the bars of the cage crashing down. The space that had seemed limitless is suddenly a prison, and even the light has narrowed to a single shaft, like the window of a cell. The movement is still beautiful, but the shadows have grown. The bird reaches towards what is no longer there, towards a world it can remember but not see. A single shaft of light becomes almost a character in itself, something to lean towards, to yearn for, and the music shifts from grandeur into something more searching and exposed.

Then comes the blinding. I winced. There was a collective intake of breath at this unbearable cruelty, and suddenly I was transported back to the early 90s, watching King Lear at the Royal Court on a school trip, to the moment Gloucester has his eyes put out and sees, finally, the extent of his betrayal. The cruelty leading to insight. With his eyes now bandaged, Odedra's extraordinary physical control seems to dissolve into surrender to that reality, his body no longer responding to what it can see but to something deeper, feeling its way through the space. He moves carefully among the scattered rose petals, cradling little lights in his hands. The world has become darkness, but the light begins to return behind him, as though the wheel has come full circle.

And here comes the sublime moment as the bird's song becomes movement. Odedra spins faster and faster, synchronising with the zikr, the repetition of "Allah Hoo." The Hoo, as I understand it, is the breath of the prayer, the exhalation itself, so the chant becomes the breath of life and breath, movement and prayer become one. Then, with the bird's last breath, a plume of smoke escapes from his mouth, as though the soul itself were being released.

Remember to breathe. In that moment I was back at the threshold, the door at the end of the corridor I had walked through in January to say a final goodbye to my mother. She had breathed her last the night before, barely an hour after I had got back to London to get ready for work the next day. I returned. My chest constricted as I approached the door, struck by an immense solitude, and I still carry that weight between my breastbone.

And now the tears were rolling, as I sat there in the stalls, in the dark, feeling the pressure ebb and flow. This grief for the mother I am missing, alongside the beauty of the spectacle. I couldn't breathe properly for a moment, but the pressure then eased, and I did find release watching Odedra. The songbird who doesn't hold back his breath.

Through it all, the ineffable beauty of Odedra's dance and the power of the emotions it evoked were such that by the end we as an audience had moved beyond the sadness of the ending into the elation of having witnessed the beauty of the songs. Afterwards, my friend and I slipped down to the front row and scooped up the rose petals from the floor (not the stage!), throwing them in the air with sheer joy and the security guard's blessing. He watched us with such paternal amusement that it was clear we weren't the first to have had the idea.

Then, writing this today, I have done some more homework and discovered that Aakash Odedra is not, as I had assumed that evening, from the Whirling Dervish tradition. He is a Kathak dancer, working in an Indian classical tradition whose chakkars, those rapid spinning turns, have an obvious resonance with Sufi whirling. The two traditions are distinct, but they have crossed paths over centuries, particularly as Kathak developed in Muslim courts and absorbed influences from Sufi culture. Suddenly, what I had experienced as two worlds, storytelling and meditation, meeting on stage made rather more sense. And I love that Odedra himself embodies that meeting, in both his heritage and his artistic vision.

But it was digging into the genesis of the piece that stopped me in my tracks altogether today. Songs of the Bulbul was born out of Odedra's own devastating loss of his mother, Kay, and he dedicates it "to my smiling bulbul, who left her cage."

Learning his mother's name took me back to a moment at the funeral of my maternal grandmother, Granny Kay. I was in my late teens, for some reason my mother and I had arrived separately, and I saw her holding it together until she caught sight of me and our eyes met. There was a moment of mutual recognition and premonition of I will lose you too one day, and we both dissolved. That was one of the few times I ever saw my mother cry, she was incredibly stoic in life.

Suddenly the grief I'd felt during the performance made sense in another way. I had been watching a man dance his own grief for his mother, without knowing it, yet feeling it with every bone in my body. Perhaps that is what theatre can do at its most powerful. It dissolves the boundaries between one person's story and another's. Before I knew his story, some part of me had already recognised his grief.

The devotional quality of Odedra's dance had felt like a living prayer, a soul reaching towards something greater, ultimately towards liberation. Now I also see it as a shared ritual of remembrance.

And it's a funny old world, as my Dad would say, but a few weeks later, on a family outing, as a treat we each chose a book to read in the park for the afternoon. My youngest chose Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. After an evening watching Songs of the Bulbul, I reckon I have a better understanding of that now. Thank you.

Songs of the Bulbul is the work of the Aakash Odedra Company www.akashodedra.com
Lead photo: Maxime Ragni www.kissmaxime.com