by Has a Nightingale sang in Westfield Greggs? Well, not exactly. But just 10 minutes on foot from the Stratford Shopping giant, the Transfixing dancer Aakash Odedra leaves everything on stage and portrays the desperate dying melody of a songbird, all the more beautiful for his fear.
The Nightingale or Bulbul is a plangent picture of the soul in the Sufi myth. It fights against the darkness and is ultimately released from the body and climbs into divinity. A voice-over at the beginning of the one-hour solo tells us that an artist dies a little in the course of every performance.
Does a dance have to be cool on spiritual topics or introspective? Not here. This piece laughs over Zame and shakes its skirts subtly. The plush score and the scenography as well as Odedra’s dance prefer an airplane with a palpit bed. The recorded melodies of the composer Rushil Ranjan have a turbulent, cinematic energy. Since chords and vocals rise, not to mention the bloody blood -red petals stumbled from above, it feels a final every five minutes.
Odedra, who has just been appointed as an associated artist at Sadler’s Wells, is an extraordinary performer. Here it is like a flash that is dazzling in the dark. Odedra is celebrated in the Indian classic form of Kathak, where a large part of the excitement from accuracy comes with rasier-sharp fingers, rhythmic feet. These precision stimuli are here in Odedra’s performance and Rani Khanam’s choreography but connected with a full-flowered sweep and vertebrae.
Odedras Bulbul is the fearful cousin of Pavlova’s dying swan – we even get the swimming trips and the shaky arms while his fingers shrugged like violent articulated feathers. Odedra changes in white with red around the cuffs, such as blood, such as blood, a bone -free shuttle and dizzying turns that change the direction in a blinking. What appears to be like freedom is gradually appearing to claim the space with wild curves, increasingly like struggle and wings that beat against the poles of a cage. Odedra dances his heart with ecstatic, tortured devotion.
Rows of candles curl up next to the stage, like an arm that weighs the room, and Fabiana Piccioli’s exquisite light design moves into a golden light or a back. As Wicked teaches us, gravity can only defeat itself for so long. The more hectic odedra, the faster his fingers threaten the air, the more feet threaten to carve grooves in the ground. Fall even more purple petals. The candles fade, the race is driven. Exhale a fabulous load and the Songbird falls silent again.
Sadler’s Wells East, until July 19; Sadlerswells.com
