Brighton Festival 2025
Songs of the Bulbul
Aakash Odedra Company
Genre: Dance
Venue: Brighton Dome Corn Exchange
Festival: Brighton Festival
Low Down
In 2015 I wrote that Aakash Odedra was a ‘rising star of the South Asian dance scene’ for his early works Inked and Murmur. His star has risen pretty high since, and his Company tours internationally, collaborating with major players like the The London Philharmonic Orchestra and The Royal Ballet. This new work takes the story of the Bulbul’s significance and weaves around it a tale of entrapment and escape, steeped in his Sufi culture and explored through his expert Kathak dance.
The show is on tour in the UK and Europe until the end of July.
Review
The song of the nightingale, or Bulbul, is notoriously elusive. People wait in cold woods at night hoping to hear one. In 1924 Beatrice Harrison notoriously played her cello to their singing. Or did she? In Persian culture the Bulbul is a symbol of spiritual enlightenment connected to earthly beauty and particularly to the rose. Aakash Odedra takes the Bulbul’s significance and weaves around it a tale of entrapment and escape, steeped in his Sufi culture and explored through his expert Kathak dance.
On a stage framed by a semi-circle of electric candles and a copse of suspended branches, Aakash emerges with bird-like gestures; a fledgling in white against a floor strewn with red petals. Rushil Ranjan’s cinematic music begins to soar. Here we go. Whirling like a Dervish, feet-stamping, sculptural costume swirling, hands describing shapes or slicing through air. It seems we’ve reached a crescendo in the first 10 minutes.
Structured in three parts with repeated patterns of movement each accompanied by different, but equally strident music, there’s little space for contemplation. It feels a mis-step to have given the audience an overview of the story before the show started (newly recorded 10 minutes before in fact). Dance is visual and emotional communication; the viewer needs to piece together any narrative through the choreography and staging, the body needs to speak. Being told the Nightingale’s plight flattens the experience, rather like an over explicit film trailer.
This is though a work of some beauty and choreographer Rani Khanam certainly creates a vivid vocabulary of largely bird-based moves on Aakash’s wonderfully precise and fluid form. It’s a dynamic updating of Kathak and looks impressive on the expansive Corn Exchange stage, cleverly lit by Fabiana Piccioli.
We’ve been told that the story reflects an artists life, that each time a piece is made the artist dies a little. It’s in the closing moments that Songs of the Bulbul delivers that ‘sweet pain’ with sweet and welcome eloquence.
